Free Will
by yeahschool
Summary: In which God, cruel and capricious as he is, gives his most favored children one chance at fulfillment after suffering enough for a thousand lifetimes. In a timeline which never was, never should have been, Castiel and his brothers experience birth, love, pain, free will, and death. [Dean/Cas. Alternate reality fic. Rated M for later chapters.]
1. Prologue

**_Prologue_**

Chuck Shurley sat before his computer, a bottle of aged whiskey on his left side and an ash tray with a burning cigarette propped into it on his right. It had been a long time since he'd gotten any real writing done – after Dean and Sam had managed to thwart the apocalypse, he pulled out for a while. Getting directly involved with the tangle of his creation's lives was psychologically exhausting for him, and after he'd finished guiding things along and making sure that free will was dutifully preserved, he left. Chuck never really _went_ anywhere, because that would imply that the place he went to existed prior to his arrival, but instead he traveled to the space between the multiverse and the antiverse and settled down for some serious R and R.

The planet he settled on wasn't so much a planet as it was a cold, dense rock, but after a few minutes, he shaped it into something liveable. After he'd set up the rudimentary basics – an atmosphere, a few laws of physics, he built a house. There were many planets like these that he'd visited and left over time, utterly lifeless except in the memory of his presence. Empty homes, empty whiskey bottles, lingerie from the girls he'd fashioned to keep him company, and books, always books. He'd always been one for a good story, and somehow there was something grounding about writing things down. Although there are very few creatures who've been alive as long as he, when one does, you find it hard to keep track of things.

Out here, anything worked if he wanted it to work, so when he plugged in his aged desktop computer, he had no trouble checking his email and facebook accounts before he begrudgingly opened up his MS Word document. It wasn't often that Chuck questioned his own judgment, but lately, a very strange cocktail of emotions had overtaken him: guilt, regret, mourning, and worst of all, self doubt. Gabriel and Raphael were dead, and Lucifer and Michael were trapped endlessly in hell – it was a strange thing, to know you'd never see any of your children again. That was the nature of his godliness, to be a creator meant to observe the beginning and ending of all things, but it still… burned in the pit of his gut. Low and wrong. A parent wasn't supposed to watch their child die, and yet Chuck had seen the deaths of so many of his children, over and over.

He thought of Castiel. His favorite, always his favorite since the morning star was cast down – he'd finally come to realize he'd overreacted slightly, but it was too late for apologies and setting things right. In this time, at least. Even for someone all powerful and omniscient, there are some things that once done can never be undone. The thought stirred painfully in his chest.

Chuck stared at the blank document, the vertical line blinking accusingly at him, daring him to make a decision. That's what writing is, really – creation at its finest, its most literal. To write something, to commit to a sentence, is to commit to a universe all one's own. He frowned, opening the bottle of whiskey and pouring himself a liberal amount, slightly wet and wonderfully square icecubes forming in the glass to keep the drink cool and clinking. The sound of slowly melting ice sliding around in a whiskey glass was one of the most oddly satisfying sounds, and he raised it to his lips, draining the contents and letting it settle familiarly in his stomach. He was ready. They deserved this – all five of them, his most beloved. Just this once. Reality was not a literal thing, there were millions of realities and possible futures stacked on top of one another, and he was God. If he could not do this for his most devoted children, just once, what was he?

He refilled his glass and the sounds of his typing filled the empty house, on this empty planet, in the space between spaces.

_She was the fifth woman he visited. Her name was Amelia, and she carried herself with ethereal grace reserved almost exclusively for true servants of the Lord. At night, she read her bible; on Sundays, she sat at the pews, head bowed in respect and begging him for forgiveness for her sins, and on this day, a Thursday, he came to her. He came to her with a smile, eyes a little bloodshot, spine creaking from spending night after night awake at his computer, and she loved him unconditionally and unfamiliarly. _

"_Can I help you, sir?"_

_Half a screen of glass separated them, and she sat up so straight in her professional clothing, surrounded by important looking documents and a computer which ran at top speed because it was only used for banking. Never did she log on to virus ridden websites, or sneak a peak at her personal email for emails from her husband; she pursued her career with the same unconditional devotion as she did her faith. This is why he has chosen her. Saint Amelia._

"_Yes. He will come in nine months, and you will call him Castiel. Take good care of him, for he is beloved."_


	2. Chapter 1: Accepted

_**Chapter One**_

Castiel Novak had never felt normal. There were normal problems people had – being harassed in social environments, feeling like an outsider, the moral implications of whatever their vices were, money problems, romantic issues – and those, he understood just fine. But saying he felt like an outsider was an understatement. It wasn't that he couldn't make friends; he was fair looking and had a decent personality, and while he'd always been fairly reserved, it wasn't so crippling that he was socially inept. No, it was nothing so simple – Castiel felt _out of place_. The only way he could describe it in a way people understood was that he felt like he was born in the wrong time. He had no idea what the _right time_ was exactly, but every now and then, when he'd wake up and slip the lunch his mother had packed for him into his backpack, he'd be overwhelmed with the sensation that he was wasting time. That he needed to be somewhere else, desperately, like he'd forgotten something of the utmost importance. But these sensations were always fleeting, and he shook them off, going about his day to day life as God intended.

His life, which was changing rapidly with each moment he flew down the interstate, all of his possessions filling every inch of his 1998 Honda accord. It was an old car, and its body was covered in tiny dents from when a particularly bad hailstorm had assaulted his hometown during high school, but it being a Honda meant that it was reliable, and would probably last him another ten years if he kept it well serviced. That was good, because he intended to spend at least the next four to seven years in higher education, and even with his mother's financial support, he wouldn't have the money to buy a replacement if the Honda died on him. So, he'd taken it down to the autoshop a couple of days ago, just to make sure that it was still in working order, and now he was on the highway doing a respectable 70 towards UK.

University of Kansas really wasn't his top choice – or even his top 10 choices – but he and his mother had grown up in the small town of Destiny, Kansas and while she wanted him to pursue higher education, she hated the idea of him running off somewhere too far away. Castiel had argued back that transferring schools weakened his chances for getting a full ride at his actual choice school, but she wouldn't budge, so he conceded to go to UK for a year (to make sure he was adjusted to college and adult life, his mother had argued) before he ran off to one of his more choice schools. So, UK it had been.

He and his mother had visited the school a little over a year ago. It was nice. Lawrence was nice. Castiel didn't quite understand himself, but being there had given him a renewed sense of purpose, fought back those strange, occasional feelings of desperation that clouded his judgment. Like he was trying to remember a dream. His mother liked Lawrence too, mostly because it wasn't a city at all – it was a college town, and it being a college town, she reasoned there wasn't a whole lot of trouble he could get into. The reality was that the less there is to do in a college town, the more hedonism its students practiced, but Castiel wasn't fool enough to bring that up, especially since there was something so relaxing about the place. After visiting the art department, he found himself essentially sold, and several weeks later he received letters of admission and letters from the scholarship department, saying due to his academic excellence in high school that he'd be receiving a sizeable financial aid package that would essentially pay him to go to school.

That had been something of a relief. Amelia and Castiel Novak had lived comfortably, but it was still a single parent household, and while she'd had enough to support him, feed him, give him anything he wanted, he knew that she couldn't foot the bill on this sort of thing. It was one of the reasons he'd worked so hard in high school.

She wasn't here today, the day he moved out, because she was working a double at the bank. The only disappointment in that was how lonely the drive was; Destiny sat on almost the farthest corner of Kansas away from Lawrence, and the drive was hardly scenic. But he didn't resent her otherwise, there had been a lot of start up costs, and since the excess of his scholarship wouldn't hit his bank until the official first day of school, those start up costs had come out of her wallet. He'd assured her he'd pay her back – the landlord of his new apartment had wanted a deposit plus first and last month's rent, not to mention all of the furniture and necessities he needed for the place, but she'd simply smiled in a slightly pained sort of way and told him this is what mothers did for their children. They helped. The only reason he was living in an apartment at all (instead of a dorm) was that the apartments near campus were actually quite a bit cheaper than the student dormitories, not to mention infinitely larger and more private. So she'd swung for that, paying his start up costs, and in return he'd promised to stay here a year and really try to like it. And if he didn't like it, once his lease and the school year was up, he'd pack up everything he owned and head Northeast.

Hunter College in New York had seemed like a decent place to start.

His GPS took him off the interstate and onto a main road, packed full of restaurants, bars, and shopping centers, through a very nice neighborhood that screamed the sort of suburban comforts he was leaving, off down past a set of train tracks and through a rough looking area to Castiel's new apartment. He'd made this trip last week to sort out everything with his landlord, get all the payments in, and get his key. He'd also taken that weekend to go up to various thrift stores to find salvageable furniture, and whatever he couldn't find there, his mother had taken him to a real furniture store for. Happy to stretch his legs, he stood up and stretched in the parking lot before keying himself in the apartment, the smell of stale air from its uninhabitance over the past week greeting him as he walked in.

It wasn't the nicest place he'd ever live in, but it was his. The larger bedroom upstairs already had his bed in its center, while the other, considerably smaller one – the real estate lady had said it was a child's bedroom – would soon be full of art supplies, functioning as his studio. It was a better place than most kids got right after they moved out, and his scholarship overage would pay rent and give him enough, money to live on. If it ever became too strained, he could always get himself a job, but he was hoping it wouldn't come to that – he was at school to learn, not to wait tables.

After a brief rest on his new couch (Mother wouldn't let him thrift one because she was afraid of urine and God knows what else seeped into the cushions), he unpacked the contents of his car. Castiel wasn't exactly known for his prowess in interior decoration, but the place didn't look like a frat house by the time he was done unpacking – it was tasteful. His paintings covered the walls of his living area, paintings from high school he was mildly ashamed of on principle, but hopefully he'd replace them with better work over the course of the semester.

After a bowl of instant noodles for dinner, he slept.

* * *

Your first day at college and your first day at high school are wildly different, he learned that morning. Castiel had enrolled himself in five classes for the semester - a pretty typical courseload – them being Art Concepts and Practice (the description for the class was vague, but it was a requirement for the major), Drawing I, Painting I, English 1010, and Intro to Physics. He had a certain number of non-art courses he was required to take, but he wasn't going to have to stumble through another advanced math class ever again – UK didn't require students pursuing a Bachelors of Fine Arts to take any math as part of their general education. It wasn't that Castiel was bad at math, quite the contrary, he just didn't like it. It was the opposite of artwork in almost every way, and since he wasn't a sculpture student, he didn't have much use for it apart from very basic algebra and geometry when building his own canvases.

His first day at college had been strange. His 8AM Drawing class had let him out after fifteen minutes, with an expensive looking supply list and three hours to kill until he had to be to his next class. So he'd pocketed his syllabus and just explored the campus, familiarizing himself with the main library and the locations of various eateries. Castiel had always been the type that could eat and eat and eat and it'd never show on his wirey frame, and he had a tendency to do just that. After a brief stint with veganism in high school (he'd been trying to impress a girl, back when that was something he did) he'd relapsed into eating red meat so terribly he'd probably put down 30 burgers in a matter of days. Since then, he'd learned not to deprive himself if he wanted to be happy, and judging from the variety of different places to eat here, he'd find a way to be content.

After he got himself breakfast, he resumed exploring, admiring all of the public art installed by past students around campus, including a rather attractive mural that sat on the side of the engineering building. It wasn't that old, he could tell by the integrity of the paint, and yet there was a flatteringly aged quality about it that seemed to settle just right in his stomach.

Though he didn't intend to spend much time there, he dropped by the rec center as well. His student ID got him in free, any time, twenty four hours a day, and as he surveyed the many men and women sweating on the various equipment, he doubted that was a chunk of his student activity's fee he'd ever bother spending. Still, he walked around, trying not to acknowledge how out of placed he looked in his press slacks and his dress shirt tucked under his belt. Physical fitness was always one of those things Castiel said he would get into every January 1st, and by January 30th he'd have suspended his gym membership and would be back to long hours in front of his easel instead. He appreciated fitness in theory, but he'd never enjoyed playing outside the way his peers did, and he just hoped that between all of the paint-thinner, various ceramic glaze chemicals, and all those cheeseburgers that he wasn't daring god to strike him down for his hubris. He laughed inwardly at his own joke, realizing he'd been standing in front of the window to the weight room and _staring_ at a guy for probably ten minutes, before he started and turned on his heel towards the pool. At least the guy hadn't seen him, Castiel looked very… intense when he was lost in thought.

The indoor pool was empty, unsurprisingly. All of the students taking competitive swimming courses wouldn't have had their supplies on the first day, but the water still rocked as if it had received recent activity. The humidity of the room kept him from staying inside for very long, and he turned on his heels, looking appreciatively at the hot tub for a moment (perhaps this place wasn't so bad) and nearly walking into a sweaty young man who'd been right behind him.

"Woah-! Where's the fire, man?"

Castiel stared. It was the man he'd been staring at, of course it was. Social norms would tell him to cast his eyes down guilty, but Castiel has never really been like anyone else, so he just stared right back at him and says "Being the indoor pool, this is the last place I'd be fleeing from a fire from."

The guy stared at him for a second then laughed, a little uncomfortably, but the tension in his shoulders that revealed his true discomfort seemed to relax slightly. "Yeah, uh, yeah. You're right."

They stood in silence for a moment, which seemed to make Castiel's company uncomfortable, because he coughed and averted his eyes. "So, uh, are you in weight class or something? You looked lost and coach said you were watching for a while." Castiel didn't open his mouth to say anything immediately, and apparently his company was the type who liked his conversations to run faster than trains, because he kept babbling "-cuz if you are, man, that's totally cool, you should come join us. Coach is really nice, he won't be too much of a dick to you for being late. I mean you are like an hour late, but hey, you're a freshman right? Freshmen get a free pass to everything their first week, so it's cool. So…yeah."

Well, he was certainly friendly, Castiel would give him that. He shook his head, once the stranger stopped speaking. "I'm sorry, I'm not in your class. It was very polite of you to come fetch me, but I was just touring the rec center. I'm sorry if I made you uncomfortable, I wasn't really… staring at you. It's just early in the morning and I'm not entirely awake yet."

It was the longest sentence he'd strung together since yesterday. Perhaps moving and being new had left him a little dry for social interaction, despite being surrounded by students his age.

"Oh, uh, right. Well, this is awkward. I'll just… go. It was nice meeting you!"

The young man jogged off, and Castiel nodded towards his back, pondering for a moment if it was _indeed_ nice meeting him. He decided it had been. After he surveyed a few of the courts, he left the rec center and headed back to the main campus to do a bit more exploring.

When the time finally came, he pulled a map out of his back pocket and directed himself to the Physics building. It was old, and while it couldn't have been much larger than six floors, its age and the grandness of the architecture made it look massive. His classroom wasn't hard to find – being a 1010 class and one of the many possible classes you could take to satisfy a science requirement, Intro to Physics was in the large lecture hall on the first floor. In high school, his teachers had told him that sitting in the front was a way to prove your sincerity as a student, but the lecture hall was packed, and the first _ten_ rows were already full with people elbow to elbow and laptop to laptop. That didn't really bother him, he doubted there was any validity to that teachers-care-where-you-sit nonsense, so he took a seat in the middle, in a row only occupied by one other student who was resting her head against the concrete wall, completely asleep.

This was what he'd imagined college was like, based on all the movies he'd seen. A bustling lecture hall, everyone typing with one hand and sipping coffee with the other, a giant screen in the front and a podium for the professor to speak at. His Drawing I class had been in the basement of the art building, with no windows and only one door, and because they'd apparently lost most of the chairs for that room, everyone had sat on the floor in a circle and introduced themselves. No, this was what college was supposed to be, wasn't it? He pulled his laptop out of his backpack, frowning that it was so much bigger than the… plate, it appeared, he'd been allotted to use as a desk. But just as he was setting it down, he had to pull it right back into his lap and flatten himself to his seat, looking up to the apologetic smile of the guy from the rec center.

"Oh, uh, hey! You!" The student flattened himself as he walked past him, trying to avoid touching him as social norms dictated. "Er, do you remember me? I know you meet a lot of new people during your first day, but-"

Against his better judgment, Castiel interrupted him. "Yes, I remember." But the stranger didn't seem offended, just smiling in a way that went straight up to his eyes. It was so genuine it was disarming.

"Well, my name's Dean. This is Physics, right?"

He nodded. "Yes. My name is Castiel. It's a pleasure to meet you."

He wasn't sure if the look of bewilderment in Dean's eyes was because of his name or the stiff formality in which he introduced himself. "Castiel. Can you spell that? I, uh, I'm kind of a visual learner and I'd hate to run into you again and go through that awkward dance of me pretending I know your name but I don't."

Well, Dean was certainly forward. And talkative. He decided he liked that, so he blew up the font on his already open word document for notes and typed

**CASTIEL**

"Is that like, French? Or?"

"I'm not sure. My mother always told me she named me Castiel because it was God's will, but…" He laughed awkwardly, but Dean seemed completely enthralled, just staring at him like he was the only person in the world. Was this how he looked at people? No wonder it made everyone back in Destiny a little uncomfortable, Castiel found himself shifting away from him unconsciously.

"But?"

"Well. You know. _God's will_, and all of that. It never seemed like a straight answer to me."

Dean frowned a little at that. "So what, are you like, atheist, or?"

"No!" Castiel said that a little too loudly. Something about the idea repulsed him. "No, no, of course not. Castiel is an obscure angel mentioned in the bible only a few times. He's… sort of like Thor, I suppose." Dean laughed a little at that, no doubt images of the recent movie adaptation flooding his mind, or worse, the absurdity of the comics. "I mean, he was the angel of Thursday. And since it's been a while since people prayed to gods of days, he's… well, he's obscure. I wasn't even born on a Thursday. So, I'm not sure where she got it."

Dean nodded. "That's… actually, really cool, man. Hey, what's your major? Maybe we'll have some more classes together."

"Fine arts."

"Oh." A mixture of emotions crossed Dean's face, and Castiel couldn't guess what any of them were. "Guess not, then. I'm in engineering, so I probably won't see you around much past this semester."

The professor arrived then, and Castiel straightened up, settling his hands on his keyboard as she began to speak.

* * *

After class, Dean had given him a smile and said "See you next Wednesday." before heading off to do whatever engineers did. Something about the idea of him being an engineering major seemed preposterous to him – Dean was so… well. He was good looking. He went to the gym. He'd smelled like old spice and was still damp from his post-workout shower when he'd sat next to him, and engineering majors didn't work out. They were all out of shape and had no social skills. Castiel berated himself inwardly for thinking so narrow mindedly, heading for his last class of the day as the summer heat bore down on his back. It'd been cool and overcast this morning, so he'd worn his trenchcoat, but he shedded it and stuffed it into his bag next to his sketchbook and laptop as he powerwalked across campus to the English building.

Part of him felt oddly disappointed when Dean wasn't there. He hadn't realized he'd been hoping for it on some level until the disappointment swelled in his chest and once again, he was in a room full of strangers. But it was alright, he probably wouldn't be here for long, so he slid into a seat in the front and pulled out his computer.

* * *

The next day, he found he liked his Tuesday/Thursday schedule much more than his Monday/Wednesday. His Art Practices class was sort of a hodgepodge of seemingly unrealated assignments, but his professor had assured them that by the end of the semester, even if they weren't better artists, they would be better art students. Better at giving and receiving criticism, better at relating work to work done by famous artists in the past, better at talking about their own work. The idea of spending a lot of time talking about his work unnerved him a little, since he didn't really know what to say, but at the same time he hoped his professor could keep his end up. Those were skills he needed, even wanted on some level, and after they'd been given their syllabus, they spent the rest of the period just talking about favorite artists and brainstorming ideas for their first assignment.

His second class was Oil Painting, the class he'd really been looking forward to. His professor was a thin, wild looking woman, with thick glasses covering her wide, eccentric eyes. Her enthusiasm was both draining and exciting as she went through the syllabus and then showed them a slideshow of artists who specialized in still life. As with all the classes he'd taken yesterday, however, it ended before they could do anything, so with all of his supply lists in hand and his refunded scholarship money making his bank account full for the first time in years, he decided it was time to do some shopping.

The art supply store that all of his professors had recommended he shop at was characteristically expensive, but not so much so that he couldn't afford his supplies. The bill had rung up over $400, but he swallowed the pain that such a large expense caused him and surrendered his debit card. Arms full of paint, brushes, canvases, various knives and papers, and lots of new pencils, he headed to the grocery store.

Although he'd picked up a few necessities when he first moved in (coffee, a frozen pizza, some ramen), his fridge was deeply lacking. Castiel had never bought groceries before. His mother had always prided herself in her frugalness, and every Sunday morning after church she would clip coupons while he made brunch. Sunday had always been their day, and his heart ached a little imagining her clipping her coupons without the sound of him struggling not to burn the French toast. Still, it was to happen eventually, every kid leaves home sometime. He hoped she'd start dating soon – for whatever reason, Amelia Novak had never moved on after his dad had left. Castiel frowned a bit in memory as he cruised down main street, looking for the nearest grocer. They'd been happily married a couple years before he was born, but for reasons his mother had never told him, Harry left four months into her pregnancy.

It was a cowardly thing to do. Even if Amelia had cheated on him, which was the only reason Castiel could imagine an otherwise happy, financially and psychologically stable husband would leave his pregnant wife, it… it was wrong. She had been pregnant. While Castiel had never been a woman, there had been a couple girls at his high school who were with child, and it was as physically debilitating as it was psychological. And yet, he just left her. Of course, the child support came in every month, and a few times a year Castiel got a card full of more money than he knew what to do with, but he hadn't seen Harry since he was fourteen. He knew that if he ever had children, he would never leave them, not ever. If you loved someone, you should never hurt them, and that was the reason he took such care in ensuring that Amelia not regret keeping him. He loved her, and if he ever made anything out of his artwork, he would repay her for everything one day.

He pulled into a supermarket, nearly scratching the car parked next to him due to his absent thinking. That would have been just wonderful – having to call the cops his second day in a new town to report that he's inept at parking. Doublechecking the hulking monster of a vehicle next to him once over to make sure he'd indeed avoided it (he had; the car was at least 40 years old and the owner must have taken some pride in ownership because the paintjob looked better than the one on his Honda), he headed inside.

Living in a single parent household meant that while Castiel didn't know how to clean very well, or clip coupons, he did know how to cook. He and his mother had always unofficially divided certain duties; Castiel would vacuum anything she asked as long as she didn't ask him to scrub the bathtub and toilets. Amelia would do the dishes so long as Castiel cooked, and if Amelia cooked, Castiel would be the one scooping food into the garbage disposal and hand washing everything. They'd had a dishwasher in the house with the yellow shutters for as long as he could remember, and for as long as he could remember, it leaked all over the floor if they used it. So they didn't. Castiel had been pleasantly surprised when his landlord had told him that yes, the dishwasher in his tiny kitchen _did_ work, and so did the washer/dryer hookups if he decided to purchase or rent those. So the first time ever, he found himself putting dishwasher detergent in his grocery cart, along with a host of other things he wouldn't have thought to buy. But he walked through the store slowly, getting everything he needed, usually the knockoff brand because really, how different could they be from the real thing?

He stopped next to a man in a leather jacket as he evaluated the chickens when he heard someone clear their throat.

It was him. Dean. _Again_.

Dean was smiling and then his lips were moving, adam's apple was bobbing, and Castiel could tell that meant he was talking. He could even sort of hear a dull roar, which were probably words, and it was only once the roar stopped and Dean was looking at him like he was missing a few screws that Castiel paused and said

"What?"

Dean laughed. This, Castiel heard. "I said, isn't it supposed to be fate when you run into someone you've never met before three times in one day?"

He supposed he'd heard that before, maybe in a movie. "I don't think so. I mean. This is a college town. And we're both." He paused, blinking stupidly. "In college." He hadn't felt this socially awkward since middle school. "Not to mention today is Tuesday, and I saw you twice yesterday."

Dean blinked a few times and laughed, scratching the back of his neck. His leather jacket permeated a scent that, even standing at arm's length from him, Castiel could smell. It wasn't bad. It was… aged. Whiskey, pipe tobacco, old leather. It sort of smelled like Mr. Henley, Destiny's most poorly adjusted alcoholic, but… better. Mr. Henley had the tendency to smell like bodily fluids as well, but Dean's jacket didn't. It was sort of nice. "Yeah, I guess you're right. First week of class and all, I'm totally out of it. You're Castiel, right? C-A-S-T-I-E-L?"

He nodded. "And you're Dean. D-E-A-N."

"Right-o. So." Dean looked him over, and again, there was a mix of emotions that crossed over his face. Castiel wondered if he was trying to figure out how to un-acknowledge him, how to say goodbye in a grocery store when there was a strong chance they would run into each other again, and have to awkwardly say again 'yes, hello, you're still here buying groceries as am I. What a conundrum!' But he didn't. "Listen. I know I don't know you really well, and you can stop me if you feel like you're being sexually harassed or if I'm being too friendly or whatever, but I'm having a start-of-school party this Friday and you seem cool." Castiel blinked at him, and because he didn't respond in 0.5 seconds, Dean responded by just talking faster. "I mean, not all my friends are nerds. There will be some cool people. And some chicks. Even a few art chicks. And my kid-brother won't be there, and we'll have booze, so it should be fun. And if it's lame you can always just leave, I mean, do you have a car? Because if you don't and you're bored I can just take you home, I wouldn't be offended or anything."

"Okay."

Castiel didn't know why he said yes. He'd blanched several times in this little speech, first at _sexually harassed_, then at _art chicks_, then again at _kid brother_ because if Dean was worried about the presence of his brother, then he'd probably be worrying about his parents too. But he said yes, and he'd rationalize it later by saying that it was all a part of the college experience, and that he needed social interaction and perhaps a little experience drinking, but in reality, he said yes because Dean was looking at him like he was the only person in the world. Like he actually cared if he showed up. And in looking at him that way, Castiel actually _looked_ back. Really looked. He saw green eyes with crow's feet already beginning to tinge their corners, despite the fact that Dean couldn't be older than 22. He saw freckles, he saw the beginnings of a five o'clock shadow, he saw a knick in his neck from where he'd shaved that morning, but more than that he saw something strangely genuine. And before he over-thought it, before his brain turned this innate trust he felt in Dean's presence into distrust, he'd agreed.

Dean's presence was calming the way being in Lawrence was calming. Like he'd been here before, or done this before… only not.

"Okay?" The other man echoed, somewhat disbelieving. "Okay. Okay cool. Yeah. I'll see you there, Castiel."

* * *

Well, there it is. The prologue and first chapters are up. I'll be updating Saturdays CST. Please leave feedback, I'm always happy to read it.


	3. Chapter 2: Animal House

**Chapter Two**

The rest of Castiel's week was fairly uneventful. In both Drawing I and Painting I, there were still-lifes set up for him to interpret. The one the Drawing professor had set up was fairly imaginative – apart from the typical set up of vases and flowers, there was also a damaged skeleton that the medical school had donated, as well as several animal skulls and lots of textured fabrics. Unfortunately, the still life the painting professor had set up was perhaps one of the least stimulating things he'd ever had the displeasure of rendering. The very first assignment she'd given them was to paint the still life to the best of their ability, matching the local colors in the painting as well as they could to show her what level they were all on. It wasn't hard, but due to the fact that any oil painting was a labor intensive process, it pained him to slave over getting the colors of various cups, shoes, and boxes just right. Some of the more forward students in the class had complained openly, something Castiel marveled at – he'd always had a strong respect for authority, and didn't cause trouble. But a girl with almost no hair on her head and quite a bit of titanium in her face had just looked at the professor and said "Look, I know this is Painting I, but surely we can do better than _this_."

His Art Practices class had given him a first assignment that had him stumped. His teacher, who exuded everything being an art professor meant by being 6'8", thin as a rail, and wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a pair of paisley pants, had given them all a copy of the local paper and told them to make art. Many of the students had taken that quite literally, beginning to tear up the paper to do paper mache, but Castiel had just calmly opened it up and began reading, looking for something that left an impression. Although the paper was a slow read (things always are when you're looking for inspiration), he'd managed to find something of interest in the obituaries.

On Wednesday, Dean gave him the information for the party, as well as his phone number should Castiel get lost. Although he imagined it would be courteous to send the number a text to ensure it was right and by proxy give Dean _his_ number, Castiel never did. Yes, there was something calming about Dean's presence, but the more he thought about it, the more that bothered him. They didn't know each other, and yet he was just going to walk into this stranger's house at 9:00pm (according to the piece of paper with all of the necessary details) and pretend he belonged there? It bothered him, probably more than it should. Still, he wasn't going to back out – once you say you're going to do something, you have to do it. It was a lesson all good people had to learn. A deal's a deal and all of that.

Another part of him, and Castiel couldn't tell if this was the more or less rational part of him, reasoned that there was no harm in going. Dean had reiterated that if Castiel didn't enjoy himself, he could always just leave. And he had the chance to make friends, not just in the form of Dean but any of the other people who might be attending. Castiel had never been a social butterfly back in Destiny, but that was because he grew up there, knowing all the same people and knowing everyone's secrets the way they knew his. When everyone you interact with on a daily basis knows everything about you without ever speaking to you, it drops the incentive to speak at all. But this was college! This was about trying new things, and he had assured his mother that he would _try_ to like Lawrence before he ran off to New York next year. Well, this would be him trying. And when it crashed and burned, Castiel could reasonably say that he had a good run, but he was off to better things. Things involving frequent visits to the MOMA and the MET.

He slept in until 11 on Friday, and made himself a real breakfast when he woke up, instead of simply toasting frozen waffles like he'd done the past four days in a row. Having no Friday classes was convenient on a number of levels, but he doubted after this week that he'd spend another Friday without anything to do – the amount of in-studio art homework he needed to do was overwhelming, and since the still lifes were at school and taking photos of the still lifes would compromise the light source, he'd have to go up to the art building if he had to do homework. It was a little disappointing – part of the reason he'd gotten the two bedroom was because he could have his own studio, but he was sure he'd get mileage out of it in some way or another.

After breakfast, he had a videochat with his mother, telling her about his week and assuring her that everything was fine. Tactfully, he avoided mentioning the party, not wanting images of Animal House filling her head as what he was doing with his college education. After they hung up, he spent a good portion of the afternoon cleaning and unpacking, something he really hadn't had time to do since he'd moved in. The place really was alright. It was clean, it was tastefully decorated, and he'd even organized his kitchen the way his mother would have. But it was lonely. Living alone hadn't been the comfort he'd expected – after an adolescence that involved trying to get any alone time that he could, the freedom he was eventually granted didn't offer the reprieve he'd thought it would. Waking up to silence, never hearing the sound of his mother cooking up breakfast or wishing her a good night before he went to bed was… strange.

Maybe he'd get a cat to keep him company. Even in his loneliness, a cat sounded better than a roommate.

Around 7:30, he took a shower and shaved. He was still too young to buy alcohol, so it wasn't as if he could bring a bottle of wine to the party with him, as was customary. Granted, in movies, no one ever brought the host of wild college parties anything – they just drank and usually fornicated in the host's parents' bed. Which seemed awfully rude, but since Castiel had never been drunk before, he couldn't comment on whether or not it was proper. Dean had mentioned there would be booze, quite a bit from his tone, and Castiel knew that if he drank his way into a stupor when he got there, he wouldn't be able to leave, regardless of his comfort level. Part of him wanted to say that he shouldn't drink at all, but he knew he wasn't going to do that. He was in college, and this was what college kids did. They drank, they did drugs, they had casual sex, and while Castiel didn't believe in premarital sex, the bible wasn't wholly clear on its policy on experimental drug use.

He left at 9:30, not wanting to look overly eager by arriving on time, and the only reason he knew _that_ social norm when he ignored so many others is that he'd been given a very stern talking to about it back in high school by a friend. It felt wrong, not bringing a gift, but as he pulled up to the house, which seemed to thrum as muffled classic rock seeped through its insulation, he thought it might be forgiveable. None of the twenty-somethings heading into the house seemed to be bringing gifts, just talking animatedly and entering the house without so much as the preamble of knocking. There were cars everywhere; parked in the street, in the driveway, across the street, and even one parked on the front lawn. The home itself surprised Castiel a bit. He didn't know why, but he hadn't expected Dean to live somewhere so nice. It was a respectable neighborhood, the sort where every family on the block has 2.5 children, the kind of place **he** grew up in. Of course, he and his mother never lived in a house quite this _big_, but still. Some part of him had imagined Dean was living in a tiny apartment on the other side of the tracks, the way he was.

Following suit with the other guests, he didn't knock, just letting himself in and taking a cursory glance around. It was a den of inequity, and Dean wasn't kidding. There were chicks. _Everywhere_. It wouldn't have been of import to him had they been in less compromising positions, but they were all young, fit, beautiful, and drinking. In fact, everyone was drinking. Castiel had never seen this much alcohol in his _life_. On the floor, a circle of people were sitting around a deck of cards that had been fanned out in a circle, and each time they drew one, at least one person drank. In a typical draw, he observed, it was more like three or four. Not far from them were a couple of people playing beer pong. Castiel wasn't clear on how the game worked, but both participants seemed to be winning due to the fact that neither were standing without difficulty.

He hugged the walls to avoid bumping into people as he made his way into the next room, a dining room from what it looked like, where a spread of all different kinds of junk food laid out appealingly. At the end of the table was thirty or so plastic cups of beer, twenty shot glasses (about half of them full of clear liquid and half of them full of brown), and several partially dented vodka and whiskey bottles. People were yelling over the music, which he didn't recognize by name but the song was familiar to him on some level, and some were dancing or pumping beer out of a keg in the corner of the room. Doubt creeped up on him supernaturally – yes, the bible wasn't specific about drug use, but this… this seemed wrong. This was hedonism on a dangerous level, and words like _alcohol poisoning_ and _drowning in your own vomit_ were making an ugly appearance in his mind.

He sidestepped a couple who were intimately involved with one another and headed into the kitchen, which had less people in it but smelled distinctly of marijuana. He'd become familiar with the smell in high school, after his mother had permitted him to go to a music festival with several of his friends. Upon further inspection, he found a small bong and a couple of pipes sitting near the open window, the contents of their bowls ashed from being smoked and quite a few black ashes dumped in the kitchen sink. Somehow, that seemed distinctly less threatening to him than all the beer, but he ran the water to wash it down the drain regardless. It was unsightly. Through the window, he could see people chasing each other outside, as well as quite a few people sitting around a firepit and smoking. He figured that if Dean wasn't out there, he was going to leave; he didn't know anyone here, hell, he didn't even _recognize _anyone here, and he wasn't going to stay and get drunk with a bunch of strangers. Yes, there was a certain amount of experimentation that should be done in college, but this? This was a bit too much for a man who'd been to church almost every Sunday of his life.

He stepped out through the back door and looked around, sighing in relief when he recognized Dean's face glowing by the firelight. There was a beer in his hand and a girl on either side of him, but Castiel strode forward and dragged one of the iron outdoor chairs towards the firepit, sitting down in front of him and acknowledging him with a nod.

"Dean."

"Castiel!" Dean smiled, and that wave of calmness swept over him again. Familiar and yet not. "Hey, I'm glad you came. I didn't think you would."

"Well. I did say I would come." Even to his own ears, he sounded stiff and clipped. He relaxed his shoulders a little. "I didn't realize so many people would be here. Are these all your friends?"

Everyone around the firepit laughed, and Castiel frowned a little bit. "No, no. Uhh.. I maybe know like, twenty people here? A lot of people plus-one'd. Or two'd, or three'd. But hey, I'm always up to meet new people. Can I get you a drink?"

"Sure."

Dean rose to his feet, disentangling himself from the women who had snaked their arms around him, or their ankles, or _something _ - Castiel hadn't really been looking at them, and Dean wasn't acknowledging them either. Not anymore. The moment Dean was out of his sight, rationality took over again. Wasn't it a bad idea to drink alcohol around an open fire? Wasn't it a bad idea to allow complete _strangers_ into your home, who could damage or steal your valuables? Shouldn't he turn down that music before the police show up on a noise violation? Not everyone, including him, were 21 and up, so then it'd be an underage drinking violation as well. And of course, there was the marijuana too – he wasn't sure if Dean was supplying that or not, but even if he wasn't, he'd probably get blamed for it. Suddenly, Castiel felt stupid for staying. Every red flag he'd been taught in Drug Resistance and Peer Pressure Resistance programs were going off, and yet he was just sitting here, trying to rationalize it because he was a college boy now.

He was working up the courage to just get up and leave when Dean returned with a cup of what looked, and smelled, like orange juice. Going against the rambled, internal monologue he'd just fought through, he wordlessly took a sip, and underneath the juice he could taste something like nail polish remover. He suspected it was vodka.

"So. You mentioned you're an art major. What's that like? I can't even draw a stick figure."

One of the girl's had swapped her seat with Dean's and was chatting animatedly to the other, and Dean just stared at him, sipping his beer and smiling and Castiel felt _secure_. Familiarity. God, that word didn't even describe it, it was like the worst case of dejavu he'd ever had, but not of this moment. It was like he'd met Dean before, under wildly different circumstances. He racked his brain, thinking of boy scouts, art camp, elementary school, middle school, _anything_ that explained this feeling, but he came up frustratingly empty. Every time. It was like trying to remember a dream, the harder he grappled for it, the faster it pulled away. He sighed, taking a large swig of his drink. "It's harder than most people think."

"Really?"

"Yes. Everyone thinks studying art would be easy. We don't write many papers, we don't take many tests. UK doesn't even have a math requirement if you're seeking your BFA. But we have to work a lot harder than academic majors." Dean raised an eyebrow at this, not in doubt but in curiosity, so Castiel kept going. "A normal class is 3 credit hours, so you go to that class three hours a week. Naturally. But art classes are double that. We get three credit hours for six class hours, not to mention the homework load is a about as many hours, per class, as we are in class. Usually more. Additionally, it's hard for art majors to achieve a 4.0 because many of our professors don't give As, as an A implies perfection and the argument can be made that no art is perfect. Not to mention that once you're done with an assignment, you have to be critiqued on it by your class and your professor. At least with a paper, you can take your failures with a bit of dignity."

Dean laughed, and it was genuine, and Castiel realized he enjoyed it. Making him laugh. He wasn't particularly funny, and when he was, it was usually at his own expense.

"That's actually genuinely interesting. I'm not gonna lie, I thought all art majors did was draw pictures and smoke pot all the time."

"Well, no one said that wasn't true."

Dean laughed even harder than that, and Castiel smiled a little in self congratulation. "Yeah, well, that's sort of what engineering majors do too. Instead of pictures it's all circuits and calculus problems on $5 paper."

"I can empathize with the paper. A sheet of Stonehenge costs $4 at the local supply store, and I needed 10."

"Stonehenge?"

"Heavyweight paper. I believe we'll be using it for watercolor and ink in my Drawing class at some point in the semester, but for now we're using charcoal."

"Huh."

They lapsed into silence, and Castiel wasn't sure if it was comfortable or not, so he drained his drink. He really couldn't taste the vodka that much, the juice was much stronger, and he wondered if Dean had made it light on purpose. He couldn't feel anything. As if on cue, Dean stood up and took the cup from him, tossing his beer bottle and saying something about getting them more drinks before disappearing back into the house. This time, Castiel didn't immediately feel a wave of regret and doubt – in fact, he felt content. Dean was good to talk to, and he wasn't doing that thing people who hosted parties often had to do – juggling friends they'd convinced to come and inevitably not paying anyone enough attention. When he returned, he gave Castiel a slightly stronger version of the same drink he'd made him, as well as a slice of pepperoni pizza, dropping back into his seat with a smile.

"So. You mentioned you had a brother, when we were at the supermarket?"

"Right, yeah!" Dean took a large bite of his pizza, chewing maybe once or twice before swallowing it whole with a swig of beer. "Sammy. He's a good kid. Took a while but his balls finally dropped because he's at a girl's place for the weekend, which is the only reason I'm throwing this shindig. He pitches a fit like nothing you've ever seen if I play my guitar too loudly, let alone." He gestured around, as if that explained everything.

"What's that like, having a brother? I always wanted siblings."

Dean rolled his eyes and laughed, sipping his beer. "Not as glamorous as TV makes it look, I'll say that. But me and Sammy are really close, and even if he's a bitch 99% of the time, it's nice to have someone you can always depend on? Y'know?"

Castiel thought of his mother and nodded. "Yes. I know."

"Aaanyway. He's a good kid. Early acceptance to Stanford and everything, and we haven't gotten a letter yet but I'm pretty sure he's gonna score a full ride. _Why_ he wants to go all the way to California eludes me, but. Whatever. He's strong willed, so he'll either go to Stanford with my support or without it. Might as well go with it." Dean paused, finishing his pizza and chasing it with his beer, and Castiel realized then he'd been so busy listening that he'd neither eaten nor drank anything Dean had brought him, so he set upon the task of doing both.

"Are your parents out for the weekend too?"

Dean's face fell a little, but just a little, and he seemed to shake the falter in his smile away immediately. "Not exactly. My mom died of natural causes when I was pretty young, and then dad died last year. He left me the house, which was why I decided to go to school. Before that, all I had was GED and I was working at some autoshop, and I wasn't really doing anything with myself. I mean, I loved working cars, but I did a lot of stupid shit. After my dad passed, I tried to straighten myself out and do something important. He was always real proud of Sammy, since the little nerd had a 4.0, so I tried to take after him. It's not much, and hindsight's 20/20, but I think the old man would have been proud."

Castiel felt like he'd crossed into something too intimate just then, and he looked around, but both girls were gone, and the music was loud enough that from where they were sitting, anyone else outside probably couldn't hear them. Still, it… felt wrong. They hadn't known each other long enough for him to hear this, and yet part of him was totally unsurprised when Dean had declared them dead.

"So is that why you're studying engineering? You're interested in cars?"

Dean nodded. "Yeah. My uncle, well, basically-my-uncle owns this autoshop and told me that's what I should look into. I'm really interested in restoration. Like getting classic cars looking brand new and stuff. So I'm here, and I guess once I'm done I'll try and start my own business. Since I don't have to worry about rent or, starting next year, Sammy, I should be able to do that."

Castiel nodded. He'd never really given much thought to cars, but classic cars had a certain timeless quality to them that he could appreciate. "That's interesting, Dean."

A couple of Dean's friends joined them then, sitting around the firepit and holding the pipes Castiel had seen in the kitchen. One was rather small, orange with swirls of white bubbling through the glass, and the other was quite a bit larger, a lovely shade of cobalt that reminded him of Picasso's blue period. Unlike before, the bowls were no longer full of dirty black ash but rather pungent smelling weed. He drained his cup, setting it down and taking a bite of his pizza. The two introduced themselves as Jack (music major), and Katherine (mechanical engineering), which surprised him a little more than it should have because Katherine was very pretty and wasn't riddled with even half as much social awkwardness as Castiel had been carrying himself with lately.

"Have you ever smoked before?"

Castiel lied and nodded. He didn't know _why_ he was lying – it's not like Dean seemed to be the type that would tease him about it even if he hadn't, but he was struck with the urge to impress him. Maybe the drinks were starting to take effect – he was beginning to feel a bit heady, a bit pleasantly warm. Dean grinned and said "Do you want to? I'm gonna take at least a couple hits but you don't have to feel obligated."

"Sure."

* * *

An hour later, Castiel was high and drunk for the first time in his life, and he _loved_ it. It unnerved him a little how much he was enjoying this actually, he really _shouldn't_ because to be overly self-indulgent was a sin, but as the waves of pleasure cruised through his body, halfway an orgasm, halfway a seizure, he was utterly content. He was also _seriously_ relaxed, chatty even, loosening up to Dean's friends, and their numbers grew and grew the more he talked. They were staring at him, smiling wide and laughing when he said something particularly funny, but Castiel was so gone he really didn't know what he was saying. He was so _gone_ he wasn't even sure he _was_ speaking, because his thoughts seemed so loud that they could be words. Or were they? He wasn't sure. He didn't care.

After they'd smoked, there had been shots. Castiel hadn't been interested in shots until he'd smoked three bowls, after which he was pretty sure he could do anything. So everyone around the pit had done one shot, then Dean had fetched another round, and then a girl whose breasts were very large had brought a third round, and by then Castiel was, as she'd put it, totally fucked up.

All through the night, Dean stayed close. He smoked, he drank, he caught Castiel and steered him upright if he was swaying a little too much. They talked about cars, art, music, film, and Castiel learned that Dean loved metal. Not metal as it was now, but according to him, "real" metal. Black Sabbath, AC/DC, Motorhead, 70s and 80s metal bands from "back when music was good". Which was what had been playing most of the night, although every now and then someone would change it to dance music if those inside were in a particular mood. He learned that Dean loved action, sci-fi, horror, and hated dramas and chick flicks. Castiel probably could have guessed that; Dean's tastes were hypermasculine, and apparently his brother was the sort that cried during Nicholas Spark movies and read Twilight. Castiel was _pretty_ sure Dean was exaggerating, but having never met Sam, he couldn't be sure.

Dean learned a _lot_ from Castiel, mostly because he was babbling and answering any question with complete honesty. He learned Castiel was from a little boonie town and was raised in a religious single-parent household, and had a slightly Norman/Norma Bates thing going on with his mother. He learned Castiel was very intelligent, and if he hadn't majored in art, probably would have majored in religious studies. He learned that he liked documentaries and independent films, the kind of weird shit Dean would _never_ watch, and he learned that Castiel knew virtually nothing about music. Destiny's only source of music was Best Buy, where Castiel had only ever bought the censored album versions of whatever was popular. Dean had sworn to him that they would correct this, and Castiel had just nodded enthusiastically, staring at him like he was the only thing in the world. Dean learned that while Castiel knew nothing about music, he knew everything about books and art, and could babble about the incredible color relationships in a famous painting for thirty minutes before someone finally shut him up.

The party started to wind down around three AM, and people were starting to taper away, either heading home to pass out or heading out to clubs to continue partying. Castiel stayed in the wrought iron chair outside, next to the fire and next to Dean, too intoxicated to drive home even if he wanted to, and he didn't. In the course of six hours, he ate his way through four slices of pizza, half a bag of cheese puffs, a handful of pizza rolls, six handfuls of chexmix, seven oreos, and oddly enough, a can of tomato soup. And he was content.

By four thirty, including himself and Dean, only ten people were still around, and most of them were laying down, asleep or texting quietly. Castiel was beginning to sober up a little bit – the alcohol was still fully in effect, but the hazy blanket of his marijuana high was finally starting to loosen and his clarity began to return. Abruptly, he was aware that it was late – a lot later than he'd intended to be there, and for a moment there was panic, then, calm again. The high surged back, a wave that had pulled back with the tide before crashing forward again, before steadying into a comfortable balance once more. Again, he aware of himself, and struggled to his feet, realizing he was alone outside. Dean had left. How long had he been gone? It seemed like hours since Castiel had really seen him. In fact, every thirty minutes had dragged on like three hours, everything slow and personal, every little moment within a moment was amplified. Brightened, slowed, crystal clear so he could see everything, even when lost in thought.

He made his way through the sliding door back into the kitchen, shutting it with some difficulty and frowning when his mouth was too heavy to say Dean's name. This was starting to stress him out. The dining room was empty, the stocks of food and liquor he'd decimated earlier startling him more than it should. It felt like a dream. Like he was lucid-dreaming, only it was _reality,_ and that thought startled him even more. He felt his head twitch hard as he slowly moved past the dining room and into the living room, surveying everyone. On the two couches, three people were sleeping, and one person was on a laptop in the loveseat. In the next room over, a pair of heads could be seen peaking out from under a fuzzy blanket, empty plastic cups surrounding them as well as packs of cigarettes, car keys, and softly glowing cellphones. Most of the lights were off, only various electronics illuminating the room and the light pouring in through the windows, and it didn't feel real.

Distantly, he heard a door open, but it felt like a dull roar compared to the bright light of the bathroom's light spilling through the crack in the door. It crashed across the hardwood, a supersaturated yellow, and next to it the dark wood looked black. Everything was black. Castiel found himself strangely compelled by this, mentally equating it to looking like a comic book, but then the light disappeared, and the room was normal again. Castiel stumbled, suddenly _extremely_ aware of how stoned he was, and Dean was jerking his shoulder and telling him to come upstairs.

So he did.

The house was quiet. When had the music stopped? Probably hours ago. It had all been drowned out by the roar of his own mind, his internal monologue so loud he could swear he was talking. But he kept grabbing his lips and confirming that yes, he was silent, wasn't babbling to Dean, whose presence seemed utterly surreal. The various electronics in the house, like the wall clock that glowed blue in the hallway and the phone charger with the red light next to a closet clashed with one another, and to Castiel they were as bright as the multicolored rotating lights he'd seen in clubs and concerts. How was this house so bright? A very old nightlight spilled green from the bottom of the wall, clashing over the other reds and blues, and Dean was talking again. How long had he been talking? It had been ages since he'd really listened. Dean was pulling his arm and helping him up the last few stairs, leading him down the right into a room with lots of posters and awards on the walls, and for a moment Castiel worried this was too intimate before his clarity and doubts were submerged in the ocean of his high.

Dean was saying something, and Castiel spoke for the first time in a while.

"What?"

"I said take off your jeans. You can crash here." How could Dean be sober enough to talk? He was talking so _fast_.

"Is this your room?" He blinked, staring for a long time at the surroundings, trying to make sense of it. "You like _Cats_?"

Dean snorted loudly. "No, that would be my darling Samantha. She's started wearing the training bra, bless her heart."

This mildly sexist comment made Castiel laugh for a _very_ long time, and Dean laughed too, laughed because Castiel's inebriated laughter shook his whole body and made him look crazy, and Dean kind of fell in love with it. But they were both shitfaced, and they'd known each other for less than a week, so he didn't _do_ anything because that was wrong. He just helped him into bed in a totally not-gay way, checked downstairs one more time to make sure nobody was getting sick, and was asleep a little past five.

Castiel dreamt of flying.


	4. Chapter 3: Smart People

**Chapter Three**

Castiel woke up at three in the afternoon. To his surprise, he was fairly sure he didn't have a hangover – he neither had a headache nor any light sensitivity, although his stomach felt a little unsettled. His bedsheets, which had been tucked around him, hadn't moved at all; he must have been sleeping the sleep of the dead. Pieces of the night were coming back to him. It was like he remembered everything – because he did, he remembered arriving, the firepit, drinks, smoking, shots, laughing a lot, talking to girls, talking to _Dean_. He remembered everything, but it was like all of the details were smudged together, and while he knew he'd talked and seemed to get along with people, he couldn't remember faces or what he'd talked about. That knowledge made him _very_ uncomfortable, and he frowned, squeezing his eyes shut before opening them slowly again.

Once he figured out his surroundings, he ventured for a bathroom. Dean's house was quite a bit less overwhelming in the daytime; last night, his vision had been so skewed that for some reason he'd thought this hallway was one of the most beautiful places he'd ever been. (His memory jogged a little and he remembered _colors_, Dean's hand on his arm, the dull roar of his words, following him into the bedroom. There had been laughter, and again, he couldn't really _remember _what had happened. Just impressions of the memory. And his impressions made his face flush, eyes dilate, impressions of desire buried under his high.) Now, it was just like any hallway – the walls were painted a tasteful beige, and it was decorated with various photos of Sam, Dean, and the family mounted to it. He took pause at a full family portrait – a much younger looking Dean was smiling with his all his teeth, standing in front of his parents, who were both young and beautiful, the swaddle of Sam supported in his mother's arms. He made his way to the bathroom to get the evidence of debauchery off his body.

After he was done getting cleaned up, he pulled his clothes back on, made sure he had everything he'd came with, and made to leave. Downstairs, the place was a wreck. Worse than he'd remembered. Cup after cup of beer was on its side, and occasionally the carpet was interrupted with stains, or flipped ash trays, or a pipe that had been dropped or turned over on its side. He didn't see anyone still around – the couples who'd slept over last night had come and gone, plenty of signs that they'd been there but no fresh ones. No phones sitting on wall chargers, no coffee cups, nothing. He frowned, heading into the kitchen, catching sight of a message written on a whiteboard stuck to the fridge. He snorted a little on principle – it was so domestic looking, but then he was reminded of Dean's parents. Dead parents. If Dean hadn't bought that thing (which he probably hadn't), that meant it was a relic of their's. Something he couldn't get rid of.

**Cas,**

**At work. Call me when you wake up, you've got my number. Your keys are in the freezer.**

**Dean**

Castiel didn't call him. He did, however, fetch his keys from the freezer and send Dean a text several hours later, confirming he was okay and that he made it home. And when he was home, he slept.

* * *

He spent the weekend doing homework. Almost all of his classes had homework due Monday or Tuesday, so despite the slight hangover he'd had on Saturday, by Sunday he was feeling fine. Dean had sent him a couple of texts, and Castiel only responded to one. He didn't _mean_ to be distant, but the night was sort of a fog. He remembered pleasure, a powerful body high that had wrapped him and kept him more secure than he'd ever felt. He remembered talking – and talking – and talking, and he sensed he'd said things he wouldn't have wanted Dean to know. Personal things. He also remembered Dean telling him things about dead parents, and he pressed his lips together, and on the floor next to his books his phone vibrated again. He ignored it.

If Dean was annoyed with him, he didn't show it when he sat down next to him in their Physics lecture that Monday.

"Cas!"

He attributed the sense of familiarity when Dean called him that to the party – they must have come up with that nickname then. Part of him wanted to hate it on principle; he couldn't party like that again, Dean was a bad influence. Dean was the kind of person your parents _warned_ you about. He wore a _leather jacket_, for God's sake – he _**literally**_ looked like the stereotypical Bad Kid in one of those drug resistance videos. And yet, he wasn't. Castiel knew that. He knew that for everything Castiel did in the party, Dean never pressured him to do it – always offered, and always followed it with 'but don't feel obligated, you don't have to.' The way Dean was smiling at him, he felt a swell of emotions (_guilt_) wash over him, but he just gave him a very small smile back and said "Dean."

"How about that party, right?"

"It was very fun. You'll have to invite me to your next social event."

"Sure thing, man." Dean looked like he had something else he wanted to say – there were a number of physical cues that indicated that was the case, but he said nothing further. Castiel frowned a bit at that, he'd wanted a little more out of him than _sick party bro_, but then he scolded himself. Really, he was being passive aggressive. He was the one who'd ignored him all weekend, and now he was getting frustrated because Dean wasn't _talking_ enough? Dean, who talked and talked and talked; Castiel probably would barely have to stimulate the conversation and Dean would just run with it, going on about stuff like Iron Maiden and what, exactly, makes Chevrolet the quintessential American car. He was at school to learn, not to… pine. Or whatever he was doing.

The professor walked in, and he began taking notes.

The rest of his week was enjoyable for the most part. In his Drawing class, they worked with charcoal, and even Castiel, who managed to keep his oil paints _only_ on the palette and even frumpy looked more put together than most of the school, looked like an art student for a while. In painting, they continued to work on the mind-numbing still life he'd been dealing with since day one, but his painting looked good. His professor swore they'd be working with the figure after this, which gave him something to hope for. In English, the class was completely dedicated to paperwriting, and he was hashing out short essays on various topics about once a week. In Art Practices, he'd finally gotten an idea together for his newspaper project, which made him feel infinitely better. He'd abandoned whatever inspiration he'd gotten from the obituaries in lieu of something else, but the paper still set in the crumpled heap at the bottom of his bag, crushed under his supplies.

It was boring week, but it was a good week. Boring was good. It was simple.

He was beginning to make Friends Who Were Not Dean, and he didn't really know if that was a good thing. A very attractive girl in his Painting class had asked for his facebook, but Castiel had responded that he didn't have one, which seemed to throw her for a loop. So they'd exchanged numbers instead. She was very, very talkative, not unlike Dean, and she swore a lot and on Thursday, he was fairly sure she came to school inebriated, but she wasn't bad company. She seemed to be very informed about art, and in that way she was a good conversationalist. He also met a young man in Art Practices named Jimmy, who was socially awkward, but seemed like a nice enough person. His concentration was Illustration, with the intention of travelling to foreign countries and doing comic art. It seemed a little far fetched to Castiel, but Jimmy just gave him small smiles and, on a day when Castiel had expressed his hunger, offered him part of his lunch.

They were nice people, but they were Friends Who Were Not Dean.

During the week, campus was suddenly clogged with events that he was being encouraged to go to left and right. They called it Frosh Week. After classes on Monday, he found himself swindled into going to a Philosophy Club meeting, even though he had never taken a Philosophy class in his life and knew very little about what anyone was talking about. Tuesday morning, he found himself at a Greek Affairs meeting, munching on free pizza as students representing the various sororities and fraternities tried to convince him he should go Delta Gamma or Theta Zeppelin or whatever it is they were selling. On Wednesday, _Dean_ of all people convinced him to skip Physics so they could go to the Student Organization fair. Upon inquiriry, he learned that each stall would have free food and "those sorority chicks sure can cook". Out on the impeccably manicured lawn in from of the University Center, hundreds of stalls were set up, people handing out flyers, clutching clipboards, collecting candy in royal blue bags emblazoned with KU's logo. Dean just kept smiling in that way he does, showing all his teeth and with his eyes lit up, and he and Castiel ate their way through every Greek organization, all of the foreign language clubs, most of the more obscure sports, and several social activist groups.

Dean didn't sign up for anything – no matter how many papers were shoved in his face, or clipboards asking for his name and KU email, he just smiled and said no, no thank you, it's not my thing. Castiel wasn't so lucky. He was hardly a pushover, but in a moment of weakness he gave his information to the Spanish Club (he had no interest in Spanish, but the food they'd brought was delicious), and with Dean laughing behind him he found himself signing up for the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws.

Thursday, the Baptist Collegiate Ministry was having a cookout in front of their building. Castiel was a Methodist like his mother, so _joining_ the BCM probably wasn't going to happen, but he spent quite a bit of time there, munching on cheeseburgers and talking to people. Being there, surrounded by people who loved God, reminded him that he really needed to find a church, and there were three or four he'd seen driving around campus that looked promising. After he'd finished his fourth free burger, he bid them adieu and promised himself that on Sunday, he'd be going to church just like his mother had raised him to.

He spent most of Friday at school, working in the painting studio to finish up his piece and starting on a liquid graphite rendering (in a new position) of the still life they'd been working on for the past two weeks. In this position, he was facing the skeleton directly, and it made for a very strange piece. All the other elements of the still life, from the vases to the flowers to every other little knickknack their professor had thrown together, was visible in the negative spaces between the bones, and it almost looked as if they were blooming out of it. He worked on the drawing with his laptop open next to him for several hours, listening to some of the bands Dean had texted him to try out, and when he considered himself finished, he spray-fixed his drawing and packed up his things. It was a good day, a productive day, and yet when he thought of the empty apartment waiting for him at home, the hedonistic part of himself wished Dean was throwing another party.

Instead, he went to the Wash World off the corner of Lamar from his apartment, and cleaned everything he owned. Doing laundry at the Laundromat always looked so cheap, even a little soothing, in movies and TV, but it was neither. It cost $1.25 per load, and since Castiel had three loads of laundry, he was out $7.50 and three hours of his time by the time everything was washed and dried.

* * *

On Saturday, he texted Dean. The apartment could always be cleaned more, but Castiel was sick of cleaning, and he didn't know anyone else that well. Yes, there were people he'd met in art, but he wasn't quite on the level with any of them yet where he could ask if they wanted to spend time with him. Dean, however, was. So he sent him a message asking if he wanted to see a movie. About thirty seconds later, his phone rang. Castiel frowned. His mother used to do this – he'd send her a text asking her if he could go somewhere, and instead of just responding, she'd call, which elevated the sense of urgency. Regardless, he swiped the screen and pressed it to his ear.

"Hello?"

Wherever Dean was, it was loud. "What- Hey! Cas, sorry, I'm on break right now at the shop and I thought it'd be faster if I called."

Castiel realized the crackling sound in the background was an electric welder. "Right." He cleared his throat, speaking a bit louder. "Yes. I finished up my homework for the weekend except for an English theme and I need something to do. Would you like to see a movie with me?"

Dean yelled something that sounded an awful lot like _LIKE A DATE_?

Castiel found himself shouting into the phone, feeling a bit silly since his apartment was completely silent. "WHAT?"

"LIKE A DATE, MAN."

Ah. So that was what he'd said. He felt his ears flush.

"NO, LIKE… I DON'T KNOW." He dropped his voice, still speaking loudly but not outright yelling. He felt silly. "Nevermind. I see this breeches a social norm. Perhaps you could bring some of your other friends if you feel uncomfortable with it just being you and myself?"

"WHAT?"

Castiel rolled his eyes in frustration – really, Dean couldn't have answered his phone somewhere a little more quiet. "I SAID. YOU CAN BRING SOME OF YOUR FRIENDS IF IT MAKES YOU UNCOMFORTABLE."

There was a shrill noise on the other side of the line, grinding, and then near silence.

"Shit, Cas, sorry about that, _what_ were you saying? They're doing reno in here too, and on top of the shop sounds this place is a friggen nightmare. I should have just texted you."

Castiel hated repeating himself. Castiel hated repeating himself even more when apparently Dean was feeling a little (sexually harassed? Isn't that how he'd put it when Dean had asked him to his house party?). He let out a sigh, lowering his voice again. "I'm not asking you out on a date. I'm asking you to a movie."

"But if I was asking _you_ on a date, to any movie you wanted to go to up to and including the one you had in mind, would you still say yes?"

Oh.

To say Castiel's mind was racing would be an understatement. On some level, he was panicking. His first thought was of his mother. She was very pretty for her age; she hadn't even had him _that_ young, but she aged gracefully, only the slightest peaks of crow's feet in her eyes revealing what she'd seen in her life. Her hair had always been blonde, usually wrapped up in attractive buns because that had been the fashion for female professional's in the 90s and that was what she wore. She wore dresses, or dress suits, and never too much makeup because she said it was improper for a lady to paint herself into objectification. He remembered her, in the blue dress with the thin white belt at her waist, how she looked like she was from a different time when she picked him up from school the day he realized he had a crush on a boy named Zach. He remembered her smiling and asking how school was, and how the guilt festered in his stomach, less like a crush and more like a disease.

He remembered his first kiss, and how Becky Rosenbaum's lips had been so soft, how her whole body had been soft, and how he'd felt something stir in the bottom of his stomach, a low rustle of desire. He remembered his second kiss, with a different girl, and his third and his fourth, and even his first girlfriend, whom he dated for three weeks before she broke it off. She'd said he was boring, and he'd agreed. When he touched her, those rustles of desire he'd felt with Becky, on the floor playing spin the bottle at Mary Abernathy's 12th birthday party, those rustles were gone. Stifled. He remembered girlfriend number two and three; once he'd really hit puberty, his voice dropped so low you'd think he gargled glass before bed, the girls were interested. And he always sort of was, sort of wasn't.

He remembered prom with Erin Smith, who wasn't that pretty but she made him laugh _hard_, and carried herself like she knew things. Bad things. She'd been from Delaware, then Tennessee, then California, and finally, England, and when he'd asked her about it, she'd been standoffish, _mysterious_. Mysterious like Dean. He'd been into that, into the way she made dirty jokes, listened to old music, introduced him to weird independent films – in the small town of Destiny, she'd been something else. He'd grown up with every beautiful girl in Destiny, and something about seeing the same girls discovering their sexuality whom he'd seen peeing themselves laughing at the 2nd grade talent show turned him off.

He fingered Erin on prom night, and they never talked after that. It had been awkward, robotic, and his penis stayed half-hard whenever she rubbed him through his pants, but never any more than that, and when he was done fingering her all he'd really wanted to do was wash his hands. He didn't want to slam her into the wall and mount her, he wasn't overcome with the kind of desire all of his friends had for each other, their hormones telling them to procreate resulting in unwanted pregnancies and shotgun marriages. He just didn't feel it.

He thought of his old church. Thought of worried women coming to the front and telling stories of their nephews, who might be _homosexuals_, and asking everyone to pray for them. He thought of his mother, looking affronted, bowing her head in prayer, no doubt asking God to forgive them, for they knew not what they were doing.

He thought of Dean, gripping his arm and dragging him up the stairs, helping him into bed. He thought of red and blue lights over Dean's face, of green eyes and freckles, of firepits and weed and screwdrivers in red plastic cups. He thought of pizza and laughter, of calloused hands, of Dean's hands on an electric welder, not building art with it in the sculpture shop but piecing cars back together. Of dirty rags and greasy jeans, of leather jackets that smelled like whiskey and pipe tobacco, of stupid jokes and classic rock. He thought of Dean, sweat running down his white wifebeater, hands gripping steel as he heaved weights the first time Castiel saw him, and he felt it. He felt it the way he'd felt it with Becky, spinning a root beer bottle because they wanted to be cool with adults, drink of out dark brown glass and pretend it was beer, but they were just twelve, and they weren't ready to do the things adults do.

The spark of desire, low in his gut.

It scared him.

"Cas? You there, buddy?" Dean sounded nervous. "Listen, I'm, uh, sorry if that was presumptuous. You just keep staring at me the way you do, and I thought you were into it. I'll just never talk to you again, don't overreact and try to stake me for being a fag or something."

He jolted out of his thoughts. "Steak you? What does that mean?"

"Stake me. You know? Like a vampire. Or you know, burn witches at the stake and stuff? More like that because then I'd be a _flaming homosexual_."

Castiel laughed before he could stop himself. He could hear Dean exhale, then laugh too, and they both just laughed for a while. His nervousness eased out of him a little, but he wasn't okay, and while the dominant part of him wanted to impulsively say yes the way he'd done in accepting his invitation the party, he knew he couldn't do that. This was different, this crossed a line into sin. Castiel had never been the type who was _overly_ obsessed with sin, not like some of the members in his church, but he was devout. He remembered the exact day he'd been saved, and he knew he loved God, more than anyone. More than his mother, and certainly much more than Dean. He also knew there were multiple interpretations of the bible, and he tended to interpret it loosely, but this… this was different. Wasn't it? He'd been raised to believe homosexuals were pitiable. That they were so clouded with their lust that they were incapable of leading virtuous lives, and would inevitably go to hell. Dean certainly didn't _seem_ blinded with lust, but maybe that was Castiel's own lust talking. Blinding him, trying to sway him into doing something he knew he shouldn't.

Dean continued to speak in his silence. "Uh… okay. Well. If you change your mind, call me. Or, you know what, text me. It's loud here."

"Sure. Okay, Dean."

He hung up.

* * *

Dean had unwittingly planted the seed that would lead Castiel down the path of temptation. Of course, neither of them knew this – when Castiel hung up, he'd taken a shower, made himself brunch, and headed out to the local Methodist churches, meeting some of the members and trying to figure out which one was right for him. If anything, he felt strengthened after turning Dean down – he wasn't angry at him, filled with internalized homophobia that was threatening to burst out of him. He didn't feel threatened, or disgusted, or even _sorry_. He felt strong. He'd fought temptation, and as always, the Lord would provide.

And the Lord did. Less than a block from his house, First United Methodist had been exactly what he needed. They'd given him plenty of reading material, talked to him animatedly about how much it pleased them to have young people interested in the Gospel of Christ, and invited him to join them again the next day. So he had. On Sunday morning, he wore his nicest clothes, his pressed slacks with the leather belt, a soft blue dress shirt, and a tie, cleaning up pretty well for an art student. He'd stayed after the sermon, meeting older people who welcomed him to town and a few college-aged members who seemed a bit wary of him. But still, he was happy. This was a good thing. He had somewhere to go if he needed to talk to God, and that was almost as comforting as hearing Dean call him Cas.

In an attempt to prove he wasn't a bigot, he sat next to Dean, as per usual, in Physics. Dean seemed surprised by this, but Castiel had told him that while he was fairly sure his feelings towards him weren't romantic (fairly sure being defined as only "there's a slight chance I'm not attracted to you"), he still wanted to remain friends. Dean had nodded and smiled, albeit it seemed forced, and Castiel tried to not be bothered by that.

He had his first real critiques that week, on his Paintings, Drawings, and Newspaper project. It wasn't as brutal as he'd expected it to be – Castiel seemed to actually have talent, not just Talent-for-Destiny. That had always been a worry of his, that when he went to school, he'd realize that just because he was good in a one stoplight town where a flat chested girl named Erin with an eating disorder was considered _mysterious_, didn't mean that he was good anywhere else. But he was. That was relieving – he certainly wasn't the best, but he had time to get better. His Drawing teacher left the still life up, rearranging it and taking some of the skeleton apart for a better understanding of human anatomy, but Castiel was just fine with that. It was a good still life, very stimulating, and his professor told them with pride that they'd be starting wet media. The real relief in the critiques, however, came in his Painting and Art Practices class. While the Painting critique had been brutal, they'd be starting on self-portraits, in a style of painting he'd never done before that utilized ultra-thin glazes of color. In Art Practices, the critique for the newspaper pieces had taken two whole periods, due to the fact that his professor seemed literally incapable of shutting up, but they were highly informative and by the end of it, Castiel had a list twenty names long of famous artists he needed to look up.

Dean didn't call him or text him again, and Castiel didn't know how to feel about that. Good, he supposed, because Dean obviously had sexual feelings for him, which Castiel had no right to return. Bad, because he was lonely again. Lonelier than before.

Towards the end of the week, he made a formal inquiry to his landlord about what it would cost to have a pet, on the basis that his apartment had a mouse problem. That was a lie, but Castiel had sworn when he'd signed the lease that he had no intention of having pets, since they tended to scratch up the floor. The landlord looked utterly alarmed by the idea of mice, which made Castiel feel bad for his little white lie, but (to his surprise), he conceded that the properties had always had rodent issues, especially during the summer, and that if he was getting a cat to catch the mice, he couldn't charge Castiel a pet deposit in good conscience.

So, he lied. Apparently he'd been doing all sorts of sinning lately. Lying, drinking, smoking. Seducing men. But as long as he asked for forgiveness, these little sins would be forgiven. It was with that in mind that he went to an animal shelter and found himself a kitten, a soft little ball of fluff that had taken a liking to him from the moment he stepped through the door. She was so small, in fact, that he felt clumsy and brutish in her wake, able to hold her in one hand and feeling her little lungs rattle as she sucked in a breath. She was tiny, but perfect and important, and suddenly he remembered a piece of a dream he'd had the night before. In it, Dean was dead. Not just dead, but _long_ dead, but Castiel scooped him in his massive hands and cleaned him up. Squeezed the rot out of his corpse, breathed life into his muscles and knotted the massive wounds in his chest back together. Felt his lungs rattle in his hands as he breathed again.

Then, it was gone. He named the cat Mia, after his mother.

* * *

The weekend passed in a blur. Mia kept him busy, which in turn kept him not-lonely, but he'd come to terms with the fact that he had a (very, very small) crush on Dean Winchester and was trying to forget about it. He spent quite a bit of time working on his sketchbook, or practicing with Stonehenge paper, trying to get comfortable with using ink from an inkwell, and the many ways to lay down inkwashes. He went thrifting and found himself a television, and although it was an old television with color that always seemed a little too orange, hooked up to his XBOX he now had Netflix in his living room. He didn't quite have the income to swing for cable TV, but he made use of the internet by watching Twin Peaks all weekend while he sketched or wrote themes for his English class. And despite the tug he felt in his gut whenever Dean sent him a text (which was, fortunately, not often), it was a good weekend. Church that Sunday was good.

School that Monday was bad.

When he woke up and checked his school email, he found his Drawing professor had sent him an email saying class was cancelled. Two hours later, he woke up again, and his school email was almost _full_ with the number of alerts and KU Police emails he'd received. Drawing had been cancelled, and then ten minutes later, an email saying all classes in the Art Building would be suspended for today, and until the… What? Until the police wrapped up their _investigation_, all classes in his Drawing classroom would be moved to the printmaking lab. He shuffled through emails, looking for answers. Twenty minutes after the KU Police service had sent out an email declaring the Drawing room was a (and this he could hardly believe), _crime scene_, the president of the university sent out an email saying that all classes would be suspended for the day.

Castiel frowned. His phone, which had woken him up with an alarm, had two missed calls and about ten missed texts, all from Dean.

7:30am: _Don't get out of bed today, something happened at the art bldg and there are cops everywhere_

8:15am: _sOMeone said it's a bomb threat_

8:18am: _Strike that theyre full of shit_

9:15am: _are you asleep_

9:30am: _when you wake up please call me _

9:35am: _seriously cas this is important_

9:45am: _Cas for real I know you don't want to be butt buddies but call me there's something serious going on_

10:03am: _didn't you say you took drawing?_

10:55am: _they're saying somebody's dead_

11:02am: _call me_

_Dead_? Castiel's heart sunk. Cancelled classes, then cancelled school, cops everywhere,_ crime_ scenes? This was insane. Lawrence was safe; it wasn't even a real city. The only time anyone died here was of natural causes or drunk driving. Maybe a janitor had a heart attack in the art building. But then why would it be a crime scene? Why would they need to move to a different room? Images from cop shows were forming in his head, of blood spatter and knives sticky from coagulation, and that sick feeling in his stomach increased tenfold. He picked up his phone and called Dean.

"Hello?" It only took one ring.

"Hey—"

"Jesus _Christ_ thank god you're okay."

"Of course-"

"No man, you have _no idea_ how crazy it's been today. God, they wouldn't tell us fucking anything – just that there's a student dead in the drawing room, and there's cops everywhere, and there's no fucking way there'd be this huge of a police presence if it was a natural death, and for some reason I was so sure it was you because you said that art students had to do a lot of homework at school and I just totally freaked out, and you kept not answering your phone and because you're a freak of nature, you didn't have a Facebook, so I couldn't check you were, and Jesus _Christ_ man you can't do me like that."

"I'm okay Dean. I swear." He paused, trying to process all the information he'd just heard. "I woke up and saw an email from my professor saying class was cancelled, so I went back to sleep. I didn't find anything out until just now."

"Okay." Dean exhaled – he sounded winded, maybe from running or just from yelling at him, Castiel didn't know. It was a welcome sound. "Okay. Okay cool. I'm glad you're okay, man."

"Yeah, I'm fine. Are you… okay, Dean?"

"Yeah, yeah, sure. I'm okay."

They lapsed into silence, but Castiel wasn't ready to hang up. He sighed, still sitting in his bed, rumpled from sleeping well, a framed photo of he and his mother looking _happy, _all big smiles and hugging each other around the waist, staring up at him. "Do you want to go somewhere, Dean? Maybe get lunch? School is closed, and you sound… rattled."

"I'm not rattled!"

"Well, alright. We don't have to-"

Dean seemed to recognize his mistake immediately. "I mean, I'm totally rattled. We should get lunch. Then we can braid each other's hair and watch Sleepless in Seattle while waiting for our nails to dry."

Castiel laughed a little. "That sounds good, Dean. I don't really know the area, so just text me an address and a time and I'll meet you there."

"Yeah. Sure Cas, that sounds good."

* * *

Hey ya'll! Thanks for the feedback/follows/faves etc. See you next Saturday if I can - I'm sending my laptop in for repairs.


	5. Chapter 4: American Pie

**Chapter Four**

He meets Dean at a sport's bar an hour later, hair still wet from his shower and a couple of nicks on his face, and Dean's at a booth drinking a beer and waiting for him. He slides across from him, mumbling an apology for his tardiness (the inflated police presence and media vehicles around the school had slowed him down), and above Dean's head, the news was reporting the affair. It was a media circus.

In the hour and a half it had been since he woke up, there had been a police conference, and suddenly it was big news. Art student at KU slaughtered at school, killer on the loose, call us if you have any information. There were interviews with her parents, who were crying on camera and talking about how much they missed her, and it all seemed too soon, too fast and _way_ too real. The victim, whose high school photo was on every news station in Kansas, was named Bethany Hayworth. Castiel didn't know her very well – they'd only had Drawing together (a total of maybe 5 periods), and they'd never spoken, or even really acknowledged each other. During critique, her work had been quite phenomenal – he remembered that far more than her personality, and he made a point to go look at her piece again, which was hanging in the basement hallway next to their now taped-off drawing classroom.

Provided it hadn't been taken by the police. He frowned. This seemed surreal.

"So." Dean was talking, folding his menu down in decision, which Castiel promptly took from him and began examining himself. He'd not had breakfast, and he didn't see a waitress his heading his way. "So. Did you know her?"

Castiel frowned a little. "Not really. We had a class together, but we never spoke."

"What was she like?"

"Pretty, I guess. Very good at drawing. She worked a lot with reflection? And was quite good at it."

Dean went quiet and nodded. The waitress eventually made her appearance, and Castiel ordered a coke, bacon-cheeseburger, and texas cheese fries. Part of him wanted a beer too, just to take the edge off of his day, or better yet, a hit off a pipe. Or maybe just the entire bowl. He'd turned his phone off, resolving to call his mother later, but he knew she was probably watching the news now, trying to get a hold of him. It had been released that she was a _female_ art student, but he was certain that when he turned his phone back on, it would be clogged with messages telling him to come home. That it wasn't safe there, that he needed to just come home, live with his mother rent-free as he always had, and maybe get a job as a tax-accountant. Something simple, respectable. Better yet, a job at their church. Amelia had always told him that he would have been a good priest, but Castiel disagreed. He liked to draw and paint, and had never done well with even _casual_ speech, let alone public speech.

Dean swallowed the rest of his beer and cleared his throat. "Cas. Are you okay? I mean, really? I know you didn't know her, but…"

"Yes, Dean. I'm okay. Thank you for asking, it was very considerate."

They ate mostly in silence, watching the news and occasionally asking each other questions about what they'd been doing for the past week. Castiel wasn't sure if it was an uncomfortable silence, but he was _fairly_ sure it was. Dean was eating his way through a full sized steak with a side of potatoes, which looked utterly indulgent next to Cas's meal, and he found himself sort of envying that. It never would have _occurred_ to Castiel to get a steak with a beer at noon on Monday, but it occurred to Dean to do that. It never would have occurred to Castiel to get a steak outside of a celebration, and yet Dean ordered one like it was just another sandwich. He ordered his second beer like it was just another coke – he sinned and glutted so casually, it could hardly be called a sin at all. (Maybe that's what this what. This transparent _thing_ happening between them.)

"Do you want a beer?"

(_They're in a bar, a hundred bars, they're all the same and they're all different, and there's pretty waitresses in black, or red, or blue, and they're serving burgers, or hotwings, or steak, but Castiel is always draining a pitcher of beer, or taking shots, or drinking straight whiskey because he likes to be drunk and Dean likes seeing him drunk. Dean, who is older, but the same really, smiling, always talking business. And he is infinitely older, he knows that intuitively. 'We've got a salt and burn down in Knoxville, and what looks like a Tulpa in Albany…'_)

"No thank you, I have to drive."

"One won't kill you-"

"Do you ever feel like you've done something before?" Castiel blurts it out before he realizes what he's saying, and he flushes slightly, taking another messy bite of his burger. But instead of incredulousness, Dean is staring at him with his mouth slightly open, nodding fervently.

"_Yes_. Oh my god, yes. I never really got that my whole life but lately, I feel like… I don't know. It's weird. It's like I know… It's not even like dejavu-"

"Right! It's like…"

Like I've met you before. A thousand times. But he doesn't say it, and neither does Dean, but they just stare at each other, all intensity and understanding and familiarity and Castiel's could _swear_, he could just swear. It's like an itch in his brain, and he scratches and scratches but nothing more comes up, so Dean orders him a beer and he drinks it. And they don't talk anymore about the dead girl from his art class, or the blood staining their still life, or the fact that the guy is on the loose. They don't talk about the fact that Dean wants him, and that Dean _knows_ Castiel wants him too, but is inhibited by some archaic idea that homos would burn. Instead, they talk about nothing. They talk about Castiel's cat, who was so small but so _fast_, so happy to be alive, so excited to slide around on Castiel's waxy wooden floors, so excited by breakfast and lunch and dinner, so happy to see him when he walked in that the kitten would often smash her tiny little face into his shoes, and he would just scoop her up and make sure she hadn't broken herself before putting her back on the floor to continue her assault on his apartment. They talked about Sam, who was apparently around nine feet tall and dating a girl who couldn't be taller than 5'5", and the girl was so far out of his league that Sam just grinned stupidly at Dean whenever he left to go see her, as if to say _I can't believe this is happening_.

They talked about Castiel's critiques, which Dean seemed endlessly fascinated by, and Dean talked about engineering, which Castiel could really care less about, but Dean's unending enthusiasm made him care. And then it was music – Cas had listened to some of the bands Dean had told him to entertain, and he'd come back to report that he liked Led Zeppelin due to the fact that their compositions were very mature, but didn't really like Motorhead or several of the other bands Dean had given him to listen to. In response, Dean put on _Kashmir_ for Castiel on the juke box, which had cost him a whole _dollar_ because it was 2013 and everything was expensive, even listening to one song. But Castiel liked it, even though the song was almost ten minutes long and was ultra-repetitive, he could tell he liked it because he sort of sank into his seat and just listened, really listened.

After lunch, they played pool in the bar for a while. Well, _Dean_ played pool – Castiel didn't know how, and Dean was so good he was actually betting a couple of rough looking bargoers _five hundred dollars_ that he could beat them. He'd tried to clear his throat, tried to get Dean to stop because_ somehow_ he was drunk off those three beers, he had to be. No sober man would do that. And to Castiel's abject _horror_, Dean lost the first game, then promptly bet another thousand he could win the second. And the whole time, he didn't look nervous, like possibly dropping a thousand dollars on a stupid bargame was no big deal, which made no sense because Dean _wasn't_ well off. Sure, he owned a home, but Dean had specifically told him they'd always lived cheaply. And here he was, betting more money than Castiel lived on in a single month over a game, and like he'd planned the whole thing, he won the second game in only a few shots. Paid for their lunch, gave the waitress a large tip, and looked at him all smiles and said "Do you want to come hang out at my place for a while?"

So they did.

* * *

By Tuesday afternoon, the police had a suspect in custody, and the entire town of Lawrence let out a collective sigh of relief. The University was holding a memorial service at the University Center on Wednesday, and anyone who wanted to come could not be pentalized for missing class to do so. Castiel wasn't planning on going – he had no place there.

After their lunch and subsequent Pool Hustle, Dean had stuffed the thousand dollars cash under a vase in the hallway of their house and they'd spent a while just hanging out. Dean always sat a respectable distance away from him, never touching him or doing anything that would make him uncomfortable, and part of him hated it. There was a voice in his head actively encouraging him to sin, to slide into Dean's lap like he was born there, to debauch and indulge the way his body craved. Dean was the only one who could twist him into justifying his indulgences – a month ago, he'd never been drunk, never been high, and had never actively considered what he was considering now. But the other part of his mind, the part that spent Sunday morning at church, the part that read his bible and tried to incorporate religion into most of his artwork, that part kept him still. And he'd rue the day that he abandoned that part entirely.

Sam came home around three, and even before he walked through the door, suddenly Castiel _knew_. He knew what he was going to look like (tall, toweringly tall, very tan, with a defined brow on his skull but surprisingly thin eyebrows. Eyes that curved up, a wide nose, and not a particularly wide mouth. He wasn't in very good shape now, but he was once, he was so muscular it seemed utterly unnatural on him, and Castiel knew, knew, _knew_. Knew that he'd be wearing plaid, and jeans, and sandles. Knew he'd have a blue backpack on because Sam liked blue, and it'd be a sport's backpack because it was the most convenient. Castiel knew and knew and knew-) and then the door was open, and there he was. Everything was muffled, like he was underwater, and he knew that Sam and Dean were speaking, perhaps going through customary introductions, but Castiel felt wrong. He felt a deep, _urgent_ sense that everything was wrong, that _Sam_ was wrong

(abomination)

And that he was going to be sick.

(_**Abomination**_)

And then Sam had his hand outstretched, and Castiel was running for the bathroom, and they both looked completely bewildered, and _maybe_ they were shouting at him, but his skin had gone from red to green in moments, his skin was clammy, his eyesockets were hollow and dark, and he was vomiting up the lunch Dean had won for him _just_ as he made it to the sink.

* * *

He spent the next twenty four hours in hell. After throwing up, Castiel had gotten out there, away from Sam and away from that pressing itch in his head, but he could feel something there, something he inherently wanted to touch at but there was something telling him he shouldn't. He ran a stop sign and a red light getting home, and at one point drifted into the other lane because he was having such a hard time focusing his vision, but he made it home. He slept for a period – almost the entire rest of the day, and when he woke up again, he looked worse. _Felt_ worse. It was almost midnight, and his bed felt smotheringly warm, and he'd managed to make it all the way to the bathroom before it started.

It started with the migraine. From the moment he opened hit the bathroom light, there was pain, and it was so great he cried out, clutching his head and wrenching his eyes shut, and _God_ it was _unimagineable_. It was like there was something inside of him, burrowing into his brain, and he could almost feel its sharp little legs tearing through his grey tissue, its teeth chewing and digging and _burrowing_, and he'd turned the light off and sat in the bathtub because he didn't know where else to go. God, there was _nothing else_ but pain, and it dug and dug and dug, tearing through his brain and pressing up against his skull, like it was trying to dig its way out of his head, and he yelled and screamed and cursed, but there was no relenting. It was unbearable. And it lasted for three or four hours before he couldn't take it anymore, and it was over.

When he woke up again, he was still in the bathtub, and everything was dark. It took him a moment to remember why, but the throb in his head gave it away, no longer quite the agony it had been but he was so sore. That's when the aches began.

He could only liken it to being crushed. At first, it had felt like he was just _very_ exhausted, the way he was after an intense workout (though he hardly worked out much anymore), or perhaps the way he felt if he'd been hunched over a canvas for eleven or twelve hours. But it was _worse_, so much worse. He'd managed to make it out of the bathroom and back into his bed before the full weight of it overtook him, and it started in his back. God, it was so _heavy_. It was the worst back pain he'd ever felt in his life. Worse than when he'd gone jet skiing in boy scouts and flew off the skis, and the water had felt like concrete when he hit it; the force had been so massive that his whole backside was bruised. It was worse than when he fell down two flights of stairs, and the sharp edges of the stairs kept stabbing him in the back, ribs, hips, and when he'd found himself at the bottom with a broken leg and a cracked rib, his whole body was splotched purple and blue. It was worse than all the books he'd ever carried, all of them combined. It was like trying to carry a _car_ on his back, and when he'd finally collapsed in his bed, the aches started to spread.

Castiel had always hated going to hospitals because of one very peculiar thing – _pain charts_. It frustrated him because, when he'd broken his leg or cracked a rib, or that time he'd gotten pneumonia, or that time he'd gotten in a fight with Billy Newman because he'd called Meghan Benson a slut; every time he'd been admitted, they'd asked him to rate his pain. And then they'd showed him a picture of ten faces in various levels of distress. The problem was that the first three faces didn't ever looked pained at all – they looked as if perhaps they were just having a bad day, or maybe they'd forgotten a cell phone charger at home and now they had to be extra-aware of their cell's usage for the day, less it die at an inopportune time. The other seven faces looked pained, until the last one which was crying, underneath that a label stating Worst Pain Ever Experienced.

At this moment, Castiel was experiencing the Worst Pain Ever Experienced. And that cartoon crying face needed to be adjusted, because this, this was _unbearable_. He was crying, of course, but he was also screaming and sobbing and every now and then just holding his body as still as he could, willing the aches to go away, but it felt like he was being slowly crushed. Like any moment, his bones would break under invisible slabs of concrete that were being forced on top of him. He thought of The Crucible – a play he'd read in his Junior year about witches, and he vaguely remembered discussing the torture these women endured. Wasn't there something about crushing them under rocks? He didn't know. He could hardly even _think_, let alone remember the fates of the Salem witches, and he wanted to call 911, he _really_ wanted to call 911, but his phone was on a charger downstairs and he couldn't get up.

So he passed out, again.

When he woke next, it was noon. He could tell only by where the sun was, and he'd long since given up on the idea of going to class, but he felt marginally better for the time being. He went into the bathroom and emptied the medicine cabinet into a plastic bucket, taking it with him into the living room and collapsing on the couch.

The fever started about twenty minutes later. Which, he supposed, was good – it gave him a little time to get _ready_ for it. On his coffee table, he lined up everything from the medicine cabinet. Five different types of over the counter painkillers, two bottles of cough syrup, a thermometer, several packages of bandaids, Nyquil, Dayquil, mucus relief, sleep aids, fiber, vitamins, laxatives, immodium, Pepto Bismol, and a couple of loose packets of pills that he wasn't sure _what_ they were. Next to that, a box of tissue, and finally the bucket, should he throw up again. He'd also had the time to put something on TV, get all of the liquids out of the fridge and onto the floor next to the couch (several 2litre bottles of soda, four different kinds of juice, and plenty of bottles of water), and eat a couple of crackers before it hit.

As his temperature began to rise, his nose began to run. He burrowed himself deep into his couch, trying to force himself to eat so he could take pills, anything to make this _stop_. He was sore all over, like he'd strained every bone and muscle in his body, and his head still ached from (this morning? Last night?) And then, _then_ came the cough. In two hours, his temperature rose six degrees, and he found himself steadily more and more delirious, coughing so hard it made him gag, a pile of tissues accruing at his bedside, and somewhere, he wondered if he was dying. He clutched a bottle of lukewarm sprite, sipping it as often as he could like a lifeline, and Twin Peaks was on in the background but he wasn't _sure_ if it was.

He hit 104 around three o'clock and had coughed himself so hoarse he was effectively mute. Just reaching out to take another swig of cough syrup was a chore – his whole body was shaking, and he felt colder than he'd ever been, and his shirt was _soaked through_ with how much he was sweating, and every now and then, that little voice said

(You're gonna die in here.)

He wouldn't be surprised.

By six, his fever had dropped to a slightly more reasonable 102, and for the first time all day, he felt strong enough to stand. He made himself a bowl of chicken flavored ramen, as it was about the closest thing to what his mother would have made him, and he managed to get about half of it down before he was rushing for his bucket. Throwing up _now_ hurt a million times more than it had yesterday at Dean's house – his throat was sore, almost _bloody_ from the constant barrage of coughing, and his whole body ached, and he prayed. He prayed that whatever poison he'd been given or punishment this was for _whatever_ he had done would just stop, and after he finished throwing up he gargled sprite because he was afraid to swallow it.

It didn't matter though. He threw up five more times within the next two hours, until all that came up with bile and the partially dissolved paste that had been his pills.

All the while, his phone sat next to him. He didn't know why he didn't call someone, but each time he thought about it, he recoiled. Part of him desperately wanted to call his mom – he wasn't cut out for this, and she knew what to do. But every hour he didn't call her, the more he wanted to keep her in the dark about it, so she wouldn't have to worry. He wanted to call 911, tell them that he was probably dying and needed to go to a hospital, but he didn't have health insurance outside the school, and he knew he couldn't make it to KU's student health center. He could hardly see, let alone _drive_, and he doubted that the health center, with its fairly limited resources, would know what to make of a student who'd gone from being perfectly healthy to _every_ kind of ill in less than a day.

He wanted to call Dean, but he knew that if the Health Center wasn't qualified to help him, Dean certainly wasn't. So instead, he just prayed, he prayed until he finally stopped coughing long enough to sleep, or maybe it was because he'd stopped vomiting long enough to hold down his Nyquil, he didn't know. But he slept. And slept. And slept.

* * *

He woke up on Thursday, and the first thing he was aware of was the smell. His living room smelled worse than any hospital he'd ever been to, no, _he_ smelled worse than any hospital he'd ever been to. His shirt and boxers were completely soaked through, and the blanket he'd tangled himself into smelled foul, and _god_, there was vomit in a bowl next to him, and tissues everywhere, and spilled medicine, and maybe a little bile on the floor, and if he wasn't so desperately happy that he felt _okay_, he'd probably have dry heaved. But he didn't.

The first thing he did was take a cold shower. The second thing he did was febreeze his living room and throw out everything that reminded him of the day before. The vomit went down the toilet, the tissues were stuffed into a garbage can, and the various sticky messes on his hardwood were scrubbed off, despite how sore his bones still felt. After a very, _very_ careful breakfast of cheese and crackers, he opened up the windows and lit a few candles, trying to get the smell of rot and sickness out of his living space, but it persisted. He wasn't really surprised. For the first time in a day and a half, he checked his phone, and aside from about five texts from Dean, there was nothing of import. Somehow, he'd expected there to be, like his mysterious cocktail of illnesses the day before was an omen to something worse, but no, the apocalypse hadn't happened overnight for anyone but Castiel Novak.

He sent Dean a text, telling him that while he'd been very ill, he was fine now but probably skipping classes today as well. Dean replied that he was coming over after class (which was alarming – his normally clean apartment was utterly foul), but he knew that his friend was probably the single most stubborn person he'd ever met, and maybe having company for an hour or two wasn't so bad. If he could heave himself up, he'd go down to the smoke shop on the corner and get some incense before Dean showed.

He called his mother and gave her an abbreviated version of what happened, and hearing her worry and bustle about and telling him everything he needed to take so none of his symptoms _returned_ was sort of relieving. He wished he'd had the strength to ask her to come the day before – having someone there just to make sure he didn't drown in his own vomit or faint trying to walk around would have been nice, but instead all he had were delirious memories of his cat hiding from him. Mia was currently sleeping on the loveseat, the trauma of his behavior yesterday having apparently worn her out, and he scratched behind her ears every now and then as he cleaned up. He couldn't remember her being there yesterday, but between all the vomiting, screaming, and throwing up, she'd probably hid in a closet or underneath the couch.

A couple hours before Dean was due to arrive, Castiel felt good enough to go out. He dosed up on various medications, checked his temperature (safely down to 98.7), and wore the darkest sunglasses he had, and was relieved to find that his motor skills had returned. His first stop was at a dollar general to pick up more clear soda, and then a sub sandwich shop across the street had suddenly seemed like the most appetizing thing in the world, so he got a roast beef sandwich on the softest, sweetest bread they had. It was simple, but it tasted wonderful to him, and he drove around for a while, just driving for the sake of it, eating his lunch and occasionally dabbing at the phantom sweats and clammy attacks that attacked his brow.

The smoke shop was endlessly fascinating to him, and he briefly wondered why he'd never been inside one before. Apart from the various brands of tobacco (chewing, pipe, and a host of other sorts he'd never seen before), there was every type of glass smoking implement in the world. Tiny pipes barely longer than a finger, bongs almost as tall as him, hookah sitting on ornamental tables, phallic looking bubblers that were wide and narrow at various points; each piece was a tiny sculpture, and most of them didn't even have casting seams. Did that mean that these were hand blown? He didn't have the courage to ask. After looking through some posters and tapestries, he finally made it to the incense, and they had more variations than he'd ever seen in his life. There were 20 or so different florals, about 30 fruit flavors, 15 that were meant to emulate various herbs, 10 that had sexual names but didn't smell like sex (or the human body) at all. There was incense that smelled like marijuana, tobacco, whiskey, and there was incense that smelled like nothing at all. Or perhaps by the time he'd made it that far, his nose was so assaulted by so many different scents he couldn't smell anything.

He picked up several cones of a strong smelling incense that sort of reminded him of being out in the woods, as his eyes lingered on a glass pipe that was the most attractive shade of green for a little too long before he tore himself away. He wasn't buying a glass pipe unless he had weed, and he wouldn't get weed until he had a dealer, and since he _didn't_ have a dealer, he wasn't going to justify a frivolous expense.

Dean showed up a little late, but it had given Castiel time to make sure his apartment wasn't _utterly_ horrendous. The living room was clean, but there was still a faint smell of something rotting underneath the incense, but he hoped Dean wouldn't notice. Even with his shower, Castiel had a feeling he smelled utterly repulsive, and his face… he'd taken care not to look at it for too long. He was pasty, a sickening shade of white with a hint of green around every corner and crease in his face, with the exception of his lips. They were almost completely white, except for the cracks which were red with blood, and no matter how hard he sucked at them or how much lipbalm he applied, they looked distinctly unhealthy. Short of applying lipstick, his mouth was a lost cause. His eyesockets were still dark and sunken, but the bloodshot, sleep deprived look in his eyes had tapered slightly, and he was no longer _shaking_ the way he had before, but he still dimmed the lights a little so Dean couldn't completely see how unhealthy he looked.

It occurred to him he hadn't been to school all week, and that he needed to email his professors and tell them what happened, but Dean was walking through the door and going "_Jesus_ Cas, it smells like a headshop in here, have you been smoking- your _face_."

Castiel laughed bitterly, sipping on his sprite and nodding. "I've been ill."

"Yeah no _shit_, look at you. The hell happened?"

"Unless you poisoned me, I believe my burger was rancid. Sit down, Dean."

Dean didn't take the loveseat – Mia had curled up and was sleeping soundly, her tiny body vibrating with each breath she took – instead he just sat right next to Castiel, even though the sofa was a tight squeeze for two men their size. "Damn, Cas, why didn't you call me or something? I could have…"

"There was nothing you could have done that I hadn't already done. It's fine, Dean."

"I could get you your work…"

"This isn't high school. I'll email my professors, Dean." His sore throat made him sound clipped, and he tried to relax a little, giving him a small (albeit painful considering his cracked lips) smile. "I'll be doing that after you leave. I've not been in class all week, so I will probably be unavailable next week to do anything."

"Right, right, I get you. Sammy kept telling me to go fly to your rescue and shit but you weren't answering your texts. I swear, this has been the weirdest damn week. Did you hear they caught the guy who killed that girl?"

"Briefly, but if you have anything new, feel free to share."

"Apparently one of the janitors saw him leaving the art building right around the time it happened. Real big dude, and the evidence is pretty overwhelming, so it's kind of a done-deal."

It wasn't that Castiel had felt _unsafe_, per se, but he felt safer knowing that Bethany's killer wasn't still on the loose. Dean talked for a while, about the case, about the memorial (which he hadn't _gone to_, exactly, but had had such a massive presence that the entire alumni lawn outside the University Center was full of people, and you could hear the speeches even inside), and briefly about Sam. Dean had finally figured out who the mystery girlfriend was, although it had taken a fair amount of work. Dean had a facebook, but never used it, and out of paranoia, Sam wouldn't add him as a friend. Castiel didn't really _get_ that – he and his mother had never had fast internet at the house until he was a Junior in high school, and by then MyPlace was no longer something people used and facebook had been utterly confusing to him. He wasn't meant for social networking. But he nodded along as Dean told a daring tale that involved a lot of breaking into his brother's computer and looking through his messages and texts on his cell. Castiel chastised him, arguing that it was a complete breech of privacy, but Dean just dismissed him and said _all he wanted_ was a single photo. Just one photo and he'd let Sam do anything he wanted.

So naturally, when Dean found the photo, he'd saved it to his phone and showed it to him at the first opportunity. She was pretty in a very generic way, the way the girls back in Destiny had been pretty. Being underaged, her curves hadn't filled out yet, and she still had that unappealing high school aesthetic of being overly slim and underdeveloped, but she had a nice smile, and her red hair bobbed in a loose bun on top of her head. He didn't really have an opinion, but he could tell Dean was proud, that he thought this girl was far out of Sam's league. Castiel couldn't comment. After his attack yesterday, he could hardly even remember Sam's face. He vaguely remembered the look of horror on it as Castiel ran for the bathroom, trying not to vomit all over their carpet, but he couldn't… really remember Sam. And he didn't want to. Something instinctively told him to stop, just let it go, and he did.

Dean hung around for most of the evening. They watched an episode of Twin Peaks, which Dean likened to X-Files and Twilight Zone, and that seemed to be a good thing. Castiel had seen several episodes of Twilight Zone, but growing up in the 90s, his mother deemed X-Files to be too scary and wouldn't let him watch it. They drank soda and talked, and Castiel never offered to fix him food and Dean never expressed that he was hungry, and it was nice. It was comfortable.

And then at some point, when Castiel was applying more lipbalm and trying not to blanch at how whenever he smiled he tasted blood, Dean kissed him.

* * *

When Castiel was eleven, he met Becky Rosenbaum. At the time, she was the prettiest girl he'd ever met – she had green eyes, and blonde hair that was also brown, and sometimes red if the sun hit it just right, and when she smiled, he could barely speak to her. She'd lived in Wichita, and before Erin Smith, that was the most exotic as any of the new students ever got. Destiny had so few children, in fact, that the elementary, middle, and high school could all fit in two buildings, which were built next to one another. The elementary school was in the smaller building, and it was considered a very big deal in an eleven year old's life when he stopped getting off the school bus and heading the Small Building, but turned right and instead entered the Big Building. And the first time Castiel ever went into the Big Building, he saw her.

She was on the dance team, and she had braces with colorful rubber bands in them, and even though she had braces, her smile was radiant and quickly, boys were tripping over each other trying to impress her. The younger ones would harass her as a mean's of seduction which, unsurprisingly, never worked; Becky Rosenbaum was too _refined_ for that. She was from Wichita, and her braces weren't put on by Dr. Newberry on 5th like every other kid who had to have them. She'd gone to an elementary school with over a thousand kids, and she'd grown up in a _real_ city, and you could tell by the way she stared longingly out the window that she was dreaming of going to the Sedgwick County Zoo (Castiel had been once on a field trip in 5th grade and it was one of the most memorable moments of his short life), or going to all of the amazing museums, or spending time at the major shopping mall there. He'd never been, but his mother sometimes would go for the weekend, and she'd come back with bags of new clothes and a smile on her face, and Castiel knew that Wichita was _better_.

Within their first week of middle school, Becky had a boyfriend named Kyle. For their age, he was tall and handsome, and he played football for the Destiny Middle School Lions, and if their middle school was large enough to _have_ cheerleaders, she would have been one of them. He took her to the drive in, and then the homecoming dance, and every male at the middle school homecoming glared at Kyle. They wanted to _be_ Kyle. Becky had worn a frilly pink dress that went down to her knees, and she'd _actually_ known how to dance, and when she wasn't dancing Kyle under the table, she laughed with the friends she'd made that week, standing by the refreshments and being intimidating solely on the basis of her _existing_. She and Kyle broke up a week later, and then she had a new boyfriend, and a boyfriend after that. She was too pretty to be single, and whenever she was, the middle school boys were talking about it in hushed voices, looking over their shoulders at her with longing in the lunchroom.

When Mary Abernathy turned twelve, Castiel had gotten an invitation. There were two possible reasons he got an invitation: A, Mary Abernathy's mother went to church with _his_ mother, and B. he'd hit puberty in a way that wasn't _completely_ unattractive. While most of his peers were neglecting to pop their whiteheads or wearing deodorant, Castiel had shot up almost a foot in just a year, and his voice was dropping a little every day. By the time he finished developing, it would be quite a bit lower, but in 7th grade, he was _mature_. He still didn't know to this day for which reason Mary had invited him, but he'd gone, hallmark in hand with a Walmart giftcard inside. He'd gone because Mary and her friends had all gotten _very_ pretty, and while he wasn't confident in himself enough to actually talk to any of them, he thought that maybe just being in proximity would wane at his social awkwardness and at some point, he'd say hello.

His mother had dropped him off at three, to return at eight, and for most of the party he was quiet, speaking when spoken to and participating in whatever games Mary wanted him to. She'd been _awfully_ nice to him all night, in fact; she'd made him participate in charades, a very uncomfortable game of twister, some video games, and when the sun had finally set, she declared they were playing spin the bottle. This was apparently what most of the boys had shown up for; they'd flopped down into the circle easily, mentally counting to make sure that the number of girls were at least equal to the boys, and then, Becky Rosenbaum was there. She was the kind of girl who could arrive to a party four hours late and everyone would welcome her, having saved her cake and pizza, because she was just so stunning, so smart, so funny. So after she gave Mary her gift (a bag full of makeup and body wash that she'd gone to _Wichita_ to get, which Mary seemed utterly delighted by), she sat down. Right next to Castiel. He could hardly believe it.

Mary's rules were that if you landed on someone of your own gender, you had to kiss them on the cheek (most of the boys had groaned and argued about that, but the promise of possibly kissing Becky Rosenbaum kept the bitching to a minimum), if you landed on someone of the opposite gender, you had to kiss them on the mouth, and if you landed on someone more than one, it was obviously fate and you had to go play Seven Minutes in Heaven. These seemed like fair enough rules – Castiel's _very_ first crush, Zachary Day, was sitting across from him, but Zach had turned into a very rude person, and he was the only person Castiel _actively _didn't want to hit when he span.

Being her birthday, Mary went first, and didn't hide her disappointment when she landed on a boy who was suffering through puberty in a way Castiel just wasn't. The next person to go ended up having to kiss him on the cheek, and then made a huge production about pretending to spit the taste of Castiel's face out of his lips, just to make sure everyone knew he was Totally Not Gay. Going along with it, he wiped the nonexistent saliva from his own face, but he hadn't really minded. It was a dry, chaste kiss, not unlike the sort people placed on his cheeks or forehead all the time at church. They went around the circle, young, hormonal pre-teens leaning across it and kissing each other, never too long and never with tongue, and Castiel had supposed it wasn't all bad. It was mostly harmless.

It was harmless until Becky span and you could hear a pin drop when it landed on Castiel, and then the prettiest girl he'd ever met was pulling him by the jaw toward her and kissing him firmly on the lips, and it had been _wonderful_. It had lasted maybe five seconds, and he'd only barely kissed her back, but even into his adulthood he would remember her. He would remember how her hair had been down, and the dirty blonde curls had tickled his face, how her kiss had been firm but her lips had been soft, how her _hand_ had been soft when she covered his with hers, and how for that five seconds, there was nothing in the world but the two of them.

Kissing Dean Winchester was better. Kissing Dean was like lighting a firecracker in his chest, in his groin, and their lips were _maybe _connected for a second or two before Castiel grabbed the back of his neck so hard it bruised, and Dean must have thought he was pushing him away because he leaned into the couch a little, letting out a noise that could have been apology. Instead, Castiel used him for support, hauling himself into Dean's lap, all knees and long legs and not enough room for both of them on this tiny couch, smashing their lips together like it the last thing he'd ever do, and it was closed mouthed but that didn't mean it wasn't the single most intimate moment of his entire life. It was more intimate than making out with Erin, more intimate than sliding his hand up and between her legs, this _closed mouthed kiss_ turned him on more an pressing two of his fingers inside her and feeling her grind on them, grind against _him_.

Dean's hands, which were still and shocked and clutching the arms of the couch, abruptly remembered their place, and they were all over him. Squeezing his hips, his ass, the backs of his thighs, mapping out his shape underneath his clothing, and Castiel yanked him forward by the scruff of his neck, grinding his hips down and pressing his tongue between his lips, and it happened fast but it could never be fast enough. This was what it was supposed to feel like. This was the reason people never left Destiny – girls like Becky did to them when Dean was doing to him now, lighting a fire underneath his heart that was urgent and erotic, and Dean's tongue was in his mouth, twining his own, and he could feel him shifting underneath, grinding up into his ass, and it was so good. They weren't moaning, and the TV wasn't on; it was utterly silent except for the wet sounds of their lips and the frantic sound of them shifting against one another, looking for friction and relief, and it was so _hot_.

"Cas-"

Dean hadn't broken it; he was speaking into his mouth, and Castiel rested his hand on one of Dean's broad shoulders and ground down onto his cock with more sexual aggression than he'd ever had in his life, and Dean bucked under him, head falling back and letting out a keen of appreciation. "Shit, _ugh_, Cas, you're so-"

"Hot." Castiel spoke, and with his voice worn out from coughing it sounded even lower than usual, it sounded like he ate glass and iron nails, and it was straight to Dean's groin and pooled in a way he could hardly stand. One word out of him and it was like he was a teenager again, pressing his erection into the curve of Castiel's ass through their clothes, trying to get any relief because he felt so horny he could die. This was worth waiting, this was worth all of the nervous energy that had built in his stomach trying to _resist_ doing it, worth all the fear and worth the possibility of rejection – they weren't even in bed together, and he could already tell Castiel banged like an angel on PCP. Dean could feel him practically vibrating in his lap, no understanding of what's too much or not enough, Castiel threw himself _completely_ into him without worrying about the consequences, and it was so hot.

It was being kissed with a combination of reverence and fury, it was dry humping like it was the most erotic thing in the world, it was hard hands on his shoulders or neck, holding him still, dragging him forward. It was like being strapped to a comet, and Castiel's sexual energy left him feeling desperate, dazed, virginal by comparison.

Castiel tore his lips away, staring into Dean's eyes with a frown, hips still moving of their own accord and grinding, erection tenting his sweatpants and he could feel Dean hard through his jeans.

"We can't have sex."

"Wha- J_esus_, Cas, do you even- _ugh_, do you even feel what you're doing to me?"

In answer, Castiel grabbed his shoulders _hard_ for support and ground down, Dean's cock getting so much perfect _friction_ that for a minute he thinks he might come. In his pants. Like he did when he was fifteen and Cassie Hayden was into dry humping too, but she was _never_ as enthusiastic as Castiel. In fact, he was fairly sure he'd never been with anyone this enthusiastic, male or female. "Yes, Dean."

"And even if we don't have sex right now, or ever, you're not gonna have a religious crisis and decide you don't want to do this with me anymore? That you don't want me anymore?"

"No, Dean."

Castiel couldn't stop. He'd tasted blood and wanted more, and whether Dean knew it or not, he'd created a monster. Every homophobic sermon he'd ever heard and agreed with had gone out the window the moment he realized that touching Dean felt like _this_, and suddenly, he felt like he could do anything. So he kissed him, hard, to shut him up because he had no interest in talking about their feelings. Castiel Novak was a hedonist. He liked drinking, and smoking weed, and grinding Dean Winchester so hard he could feel the creases and veins in his cock through _two layers_ of clothing. He liked the look on Dean's face, which was of surprise and lust and _reverence_, and he liked the startled way he reacted when Castiel would grind on him in a particularly forceful way. He liked _this_.

In matters of God, he found it was easier to ask for forgiveness rather than permission.

* * *

Hey guys. Back from the dead, computer is repaired and regular posting shall commence. Please leave some feedback.


	6. Chapter 5: American Pie

_**Chapter Five**_

During the Sunday morning sermon Cas dragged him to, Dean thinks about sex.

How couldn't he? The preacher was going on and on about overindulging, of sins of the flesh, and Cas was there next to him looking like a perfect little gentleman in slacks and a tie, still a bit green around the gills but lips all swollen from kissing. He wondered if anyone here knew – Castiel had introduced him as his friend, Dean Winchester, and then there had been older people everywhere, shaking his hand, happy to see him, happy to see that there were still young people interested in the Word, and Dean didn't have the heart to correct them, so he just smiled in that disarming way that put trust into people's minds and just _yeah, yeah, great to be here, always interested in the good book_. Castiel had laughed each time Dean lied, never touching him but never straying far, either. When Castiel moved one way, Dean inevitably followed; if Castiel turned to speak with a churchmember, Dean's eyes would be on him, never wholly listening to the conversation but never excusing himself from it either.

Thursday had been good. Thursday had been the _horrible_ smell of whatever incense Cas had picked up, masking the smell of something worse, the kind of thing you had to get on your hands and knees to get out of floors, maybe even tear out the wood. It smelled like death, and there Cas had been, with his eyes red and his eyesockets _purple_, his lips white except for the feathered lines of blood persistently hanging into the cracks of his mouth. And they'd been talking, watching something on Castiel's XBOX, and there had been glasses of water, juice, sprite, and Cas had been putting lipbalm on because every time he smiled, he split his lip right in the center and blood would run down onto his front teeth. And fuck, he tried not to sound so gay but he loved him them, loved him in a way that was old, like he'd known Castiel for a long time. Like they had history, even though they didn't, and Dean kissed him because he didn't know what to do with himself. With that love.

But Dean learned he didn't know Castiel at all. He'd expected to get punched, or at least _slapped_, probably with some self-righteous speech about how Dean had no right, and then there'd be something about corruption, and then there'd be something about Jesus, and Dean was fully prepared to just take it because Cas would have been right. He _didn't_ have a right. Castiel had told him No and he'd just done what he wanted anyway. Instead, Castiel was all over him, all dark hair and dark eyes and stubble rubbing against his cheek, and even with his dry lips Cas kissed him like he was dying, like it was the last thing he'd ever do.

If one defined sex as penetrative intercourse, they didn't have sex. But that didn't mean Dean wasn't satisfied – touching Castiel was chaining himself to a comet, and Castiel was always thousands of miles away, speeding through space before Dean even knew what had hit him.

Thursday had been Castiel yanking him by the jacket and dragging him into his bedroom, which smelled much better than the living room – every inch of it smelled like Cas. His wrinkled pillows, unmade bed, dirty laundry, mementos from home; everything was Cas and he reveled in it. The smell made him heady, like if he drank a glass of whiskey too fast, not _drunk_ or _tipsy_ but just heady, and the whole thing felt unreal. So when Castiel's lips were on his again and this time Dean tasted _blood_, that little moment was like endless clarity for him – it confirmed that this _was_ real, it would always be real, even if everything else wasn't. Cas was in his lap again, grinding into him deeply, kissing everywhere, and at some point Dean had latched onto his throat like a dog and bit until he bruised.

There had been hands, Cas's hands, large, calloused, covered in scars, and Dean's hands had been up his shirt, his cock pressed against him as they dry humped like teenagers, and there had been bites and grunts and very, _very_ occasionally moans that sounded a little girlish to both of them. Castiel, as if suddenly remembering something very important, had pulled away from him for a moment, breaking the kiss, breaking the hungry, desperate _thing_ that was happening between them, and Dean had been ready to protest when Castiel had put his hand over his groin and unzipped his jeans. In church, Dean's face was red, and in retrospect he'd probably made some undignified bitchnoise because Castiel had smirked at him in a way that was _completely_ inhuman, and it sent him into a lust he'd never felt so little control over. Castiel, who pushed Dean's jeans off his hips and was suddenly jerking him off like it didn't _completely_ go against that whole 'We can't have sex' declaration he'd made not twenty minutes ago, and Dean was so fucking overwhelmed he thought it couldn't be real. That he was going to wake up alone with his boner any minute now, but it kept happening, and Cas kept _kissing him_ with this urgency that Dean's mind couldn't have made up.

Because _nobody_ kissed like that.

Cas had been too many places at once; his weight was _everywhere_, like his body was massive because it seemed like every inch of his body was being suppressed, but Cas wasn't anywhere but between his legs, in reality. Dean's knees were adjacent to Cas's shoulders, and the hand that wasn't jerking him off like it would _save their lives_ was holding him by the neck, bruising what was already bruised, holding him in a kiss that tasted like blood and sickness and something underneath that, Cas_cascascas__**cas**_, and Dean was suddenly _there, _way too fucking fast, and he must have recoiled or something, trying to hold it in, because Castiel had just yanked him back into it, ripping his orgasm out of him like it had been his all along. There was no porn speak, no _cum for me Deans_, no raising his hand to lick the semen away while maintaining eye contact; Castiel didn't move like that. Dean didn't understand then, and hell, a lifetime of fucking Castiel wouldn't _make him understand_, but as he reminisced in church, he thought that Cas might be something really, genuinely special.

He'd thought a whole bunch of girls were genuinely special in high school, and infinitely more in college, when all of them were smart and funny and had quirky talents. And there'd been guys, too; going to KU had taught him that being bisexual was not only acceptable, but practically normal. But Castiel… it was so different. Castiel looked at things, ordinary things, like a discarded beer can on the side of the street with such intensity, you'd think it was art. And for a while, Dean had thought that was what Cas _was _doing – like that annoying guy from American Beauty, videotaping plastic bags and calling it beautiful. But it was more than that. It wasn't just deep appreciation, but like he was experiencing everything for the first time. Life _happened_ to most people and they didn't even know it, but Castiel seemed abundantly aware at how much even the most pointless things in the world had worth. So he didn't fake anything. If Cas was moved by a snake in the grass, he would stop and watch it. If he was moved watching an old woman reading a newspaper, he'd watch her, always with a small frown, _really_ looking at her. And that was how he'd looked at Dean, as he made him cum.

That had been the first handjob. After Dean had recovered, he'd thrown Cas onto his back and sucked him off, and Cas had _screamed_, fingers digging into his sheets and hips canting to fuck Dean's mouth, and God, Dean let him. Dean realized on Thursday that he was about fucking ready to indulge him anything, because after Dean swallowed, Cas had just looked and him and said "Do you have any weed?"

All sex faced, chest heaving, eyes dilated, hair everywhere. How could he say no?

So calls had been made. Castiel didn't have a smoking implement and Dean was _shit_ at rolling joints, so they'd gotten dressed and hauled into Dean's impala to run errands. It was dark, and Castiel was glowing underneath the streetlights, glowing whenever he checked his phone, laughing at his jokes and smiling when Dean had slid a Led Zeppelin tape into the deck, and he'd been happy. He'd been happy when he took the long-long way to his dealer's house so they could listen to the full version of Ramble On, and Cas knew most of the words, and they sang off key, and Dean Winchester was in _love_. Then they'd gone to Scootie's, a corner store near Cas's place, to get liquor and cigarettes. Cas had wanted vodka and orange juice, so Dean paid for it, along with the six pack of beer and a pack of Newports, and then they'd gone to a headshop and he'd purchased a phallic looking bubbler. Dean preferred pipes (or handmade gravity bongs), but Cas would look good with his lips wrapped around it, so he'd shelled out the $60 for it.

The trip took a while, and Dean kept taking The Long Long Way, and they'd listened to the whole Led Zeppelin tape, and every now and then Cas would sit up and suck on his throat. Usually (but not exclusively) at redlights. And those red lights would shine down on them, shine the way it had that night at his party, when all the lights in his house had seemed so intense, and Cas was _so _fucked up and so gorgeous.

When they got back to Castiel's apartment, they didn't smoke right away. Dean had just enough time to set down everything glass before Castiel pushed him so hard he'd thought he was angry with him, pushed him _hard_ into the fridge that the whole kitchen seemed to shake, and again, Cas was everywhere. He was tongues and teeth and his voice was _endlessly_ deep, and his eyes were so blue that this had to be real. Dean's dreaming mind just wasn't his goddamn creative, and with that knowledge he grabbed Castiel by the shoulders and shuffled him into the living room, onto the couch, pulling off Cas's shirt, then his pants, running his hands all over his still-clammy body before he jerked him off, and fuck him if Castiel didn't just rip his goddamn heart out and _eat it_ when he came. His eyes had gone wide, the dilation retracting, hips twitching and canting violently, and he'd just said "_Dean_." before he lost it.

They'd put on Twin Peaks and smoked for the rest of the night.

Friday and Saturday had been incredible. Friday and Saturday had been like watching Eve bite into the apple and realize that apples tasted a lot better than whatever shit diet she'd been on before, because Castiel _indulged_ and every time he did, his body sang. And Dean fucking _loved_ watching it, watching him realize how much he loved being high, or drunk, or in the throes of passion, and if he were totally honest with himself, that was _unquestionably_ what he loved the most.

Castiel sucked him off for the first time Friday night, and he'd been high, but for some reason, the task had given him a moment of clarity because he had that unbridled intensity when he sunk between Dean's legs and pulled off his jeans and boxers. Dean had been on the receiving end of a _lot_ of blowies – he was still rusty and kind of awkward when he gave them, but he'd never had problems picking up girls when they were on the road, and get a girl drunk enough, she's ready to prove that she too had something like Castiel lurking inside of her. Like Castiel being the operant phrase, because as he learned, Castiel sucked cock like he should be paid to do it. _Nobody_ should be that good at something and not get paid for it, but Cas… fuck.

Castiel took him into his mouth without teasing him first. Dean didn't actually like that part – he was sort of into the whole slow, sexy buildup thing, but Cas apparently had no interest in it because he'd taken _all_ of Dean into his mouth, all the way down his fucking throat like it wasn't even an issue, and he'd felt Cas's throat contract, threatening to gag, but he'd just held very still for a moment, and then the contraction was gone. Like he'd fucking _willed it_ to go away. You do not _will away_ a fucking gag reflex, but Cas had just choked spasmotically around him for half a second before he was utterly calm again, and then he was pulling up, then bobbing back down, and Dean had let out this perfectly contented sigh and watched. Cas's head bobbed on him, his hands holding Dean's hips still and eyes open, utterly concentrated, tongue working all over his cock as he rode it, and if he ever pulled up to slow down, it was to suck the _hell_ out of the tip, and Dean kind of thought he was gonna fucking die every now and then.

But Cas skated the line like a fucking Olympian. Every time Dean thought he was sucking _way too fucking hard_, or using _way too much teeth_, or squeezing his cock so hard it was gonna just _burst_, Cas yanked back in whatever way he needed to, letting him catch up, letting him revel in being pushed as far as he could go. Cas, whose head was bobbing between his legs, hands moving from his hips to his lower torso, which he held almost reverently, his knees shaking a little from being pressed painfully into the hardwood, and when Dean came, it was shouting Cas's name like a curse. Cas, who just dipped forward until he was nose was pressed into pubic hair, sucking him all the way through it, swallowing everything until he finally pulled back and said "I enjoyed that, Dean."

Cas had this way of blowing his mind.

They ran out of weed fast – Dean had only gotten a gram, and Castiel smoked him under the table each time. Even when he was so baked he couldn't stand, Cas just asked for more, like no amount of pleasure would ever be enough. He was the same way in bed. Sure, he had a refractory period, but he usually spent it between Dean's legs, sucking his cock, giving him handjobs, or sometimes just grinding into him so good that Dean came anyway. On his lowerback, or between his thighs, and then Cas would want to cum too, and how could Dean say no? How could he deny him anything?

So there had been more runs to his dealer. Cas gave him money, looking apologetic, and ordinarily he might have minded – he practically had a kid to support. But fuck if Cas would ask for something and Dean ever even _considered_ saying no.

He'd gone to work at points, leaving Cas a sleeping heap in his bed or a very stoned heap on his couch, but they'd both mutually understood that if Dean had to go to work, he would come back. Maybe he'd come back with food, or even just food ingredients (to his delight, he learned that when not so sick he couldn't function, Castiel was an incredible cook), but Cas would be there when he came back. Once, he'd been on his laptop talking to his mother, and Dean had wanted to involve himself somehow, a subtle way of introducing himself to her. Maybe walk through the background, or shout something at Cas that he'd have to respond to, but Dean never did. He figured Cas's anti-gay thing came from overly religious parents (didn't it always?), so he'd just watched him covertly, watched the way Cas smiled, eyes full of love, laughing at her jokes and assuring her everything was alright.

He missed his mom. He missed them both.

Saturday, Dean had sobered up long enough to take them to the drive in. It was almost _too_ 1950s for him, but the fact was that he owned a classic car, and classic cars belonged in drive ins, with babes in the passenger's seat (or better yet, the back seat) and stupid horror movies on giant screens in front of them. And just like in a 50s movie, they'd ended up in the back, both of them really too tall for it but they'd just laughed whenever one of them hit the roof, or halfway fell into the floor, and Cas had been high and happy and came into Dean's hand the horror movie narrowed its cast down to the Final Girl. He swallowed Dean's cum just quickly enough for him to sit up and catch the last five minutes of the film, in which she made her daring escape and managed to defeat the killer, and really, wasn't that the most important part?

Sunday morning, Dean had been sleeping the sleep of the truly happy when Cas's radio alarm went off. Unlike what he'd grown up hearing, various classic rock stations shouting that _you're listening to WK1K Classic Rock, and we're rocking your Sunday morning with Deep Purple_, it'd been this _creepy_ French song that yanked him out of his post coital slumber faster than he thought possible. Castiel, however, was up even faster, and Dean had groaned and grumbled and struggled to turn the thing off, and every cry of _what time is it_ went unanswered.

It wasn't until thirty minutes later, after he'd managed to fall back into an uneasy sleep despite the song, that Cas had knocked loudly on the door and yelled for him to get up.

And then they were here. He hadn't forced Dean to put on anything fancy, just told him to put some clothes on because it was time for church. Like _every_ college kid who spent their weekends in homosexual trysts, smoking weed and drinking like fiends, woke up at 8am on Sunday for church, but he couldn't deny him a goddamn thing, so, keeping the grumbling to a minimum, Dean threw something on and they went to church. Dean hadn't been to church in _years_, since he was… maybe ten? He and Sammy had gone with Uncle Bobby because there was supposed to be an Easter Egg hunt, and Dad had been out on a job, so they'd all piled into one of Bobby's clunkers and went to church. Then, Sammy _destroyed_ the Easter Egg hunt – the kid was a hunter after all, born and raised, and he'd had no trouble finding nearly every egg. They'd shared the loot for the rest of the day, even though Dean didn't take part in the hunt, and while the Easter Bunny never showed, they'd eaten chocolate rabbits until they were both on the edge of throwing up. And they'd laughed the whole damn time.

And now, he was at church again. Only there wasn't the excuse of a major holiday – it was just Sunday, any Sunday, and Cas was next to him, and Dean was reliving every moment of their weekend, and occasionally Cas would nudge his arm and get him to stand up. Every now and then, Cas would hand him a bible, because everyone else in the church had one, always open to the right page because Cas was apparently all about this Jesus stuff, and you know, it was kind of cool. Dean knew about all the worst things in the world, and on some level, he thought Cas might too. But Cas just kept on going, just kept his head bowed, blue eyes appraising the pages before darting back to the preacher, always intense. And Dean loved him, in his stupid little tie with his shirt tucked into his pants like a perfectly respectable young man, Dean loved him so much he could hardly stand it.

After church, they ran to the grocery store for some essentials, and then they went back to Cas's place for brunch, and if Castiel cooked good dinners, it was nothing compared to breakfast. He made breakfast like he was _born_ to make breakfast – yeah, the eggs were a little overdone, and the sausage links were a little cold in the middle, but the bacon and biscuits were perfect, and when the pancakes were drowning in syrup, Dean could have sworn it was the best meal he'd had since Mary died.

* * *

Castiel's high _literally_ tapered off some time Sunday evening when Dean said he had to go, because he had school the next day, and he needed to make sure Sam hadn't thrown any wild parties while he'd been gone, and after a peaceful goodbye, the weed and liquor safely in Dean's car where Castiel couldn't continue to use it in his absence, he sobered up. He did all of his non art homework (his artwork he was a full _week_ behind on, and he wasn't going to go up to the school to work at this hour), cleaned his apartment, and slept, and he slept _well_. He slept the way a man only could if he was genuinely happy, and for the first time in a very long time, Castiel felt genuinely happy. And despite that his high literally tapered off sometime around nine on Sunday, he didn't _really_ come down from his weekend until the following Thursday.

His week was spent catching up, and while his professors all spoke to him with urgency, he never found himself getting overwhelmed. In Art Practices, his second assignment was to do a performance piece – any type of performance piece. The good news was that one couldn't really… create performance art in a classroom. Or at least, freshman art students who'd never done performance art in their lives couldn't – the two lessons he'd missed had apparently been 6 hours of people fuming about the assignment, or pretending like they were brainstorming in their sketchbooks when in reality they were working on other assignments, or just drawing. Perhaps a couple of students were actually showing progress, but truthfully, Castiel wasn't far behind at all. Drawing had been moved to the Printmaking room, which Castiel appreciated – it smelled better in here, and there was more light, and to his surprise, they'd kept the old still life. Following the arrest, certain pieces of evidence were returned to the university if they hadn't mattered that much anyway, and apparently, this had been one of those pieces that hadn't mattered. The only class he felt _terribly_ behind in was Painting, but he still managed to catch up. It was all about putting in the hours, and Castiel stayed after school and showed up early, working on his self-portrait or his wet-media drawings, and even sometimes trying to figure out what he would do for performance.

It wasn't easy, but it was what he had to do, and he felt content. Dean would text him, and he could tell things were different now, and _staying_ different. The texts were flirtatious, occasionally asking him if he was free for an hour so they could get lunch, and once, when Castiel was working late in the Painting studio and Dean wasn't working, he brought them Indian take out and they'd eaten it on the studio's dirty floor. And there was some kissing, lips tingling in reaction to the food, and it had been good. Everything had been good. On Thursday, he'd gotten a text from Dean asking him to come over to his place, and Cas had accepted, even if his gut tugged nervously because the last time he'd gone over there, he'd apparently gotten the bubonic plague.

The good news was that he _didn't_ get the bubonic plague again. In fact, the reason Castiel finally came crashing down from his high had nothing to do with Dean, Sam, or even himself, really. It had to do with a guy named David Orland, who was eighteen and talked too much, used more expletives in his speech than was really necessary, and had a girlfriend he always talked about, but Castiel had never met. A girlfriend named Jen, he'd said, and despite the fact that no one cared about Jen (and several of his peers probably doubted that she existed), David was always talking about her. About how amazing Jen was, about how pretty she was, and smart, and how she was getting an impressive sounding _biology_ degree. And he would tell stories no one wanted to hear about the shenanigans they'd gotten into during the weekends, and some people would laugh because David was trying so hard, but Castiel never had. He sort of regretted it now, because Jen, who in fact _was_ very pretty, was on the news. Dean and Sam were both in the living room when he'd walked in, staring at her, and she was weeping as a reporter barraged her with questions.

David Orland, a freshman Graphic Design major in his Drawing I class, was dead.

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